5 Lbook of GRE Practice Problems - No Cost Library

5 Lb Book of GRE Practice Problems (Manhattan Prep 5 lb Series) - 2nd Editon 

        Publisher: Manhattan Prep, Year: 2015   

                                        

 Description: 

The 5 lb best-seller. To give more specialised online tools and hundreds of additional queries, the Book of GRE Practice Issues has been revised. It includes over 1,800 practise issues covering each subject tested on the GRE, making it an invaluable resource at every level for students. The 5 pound Manhattan Prep. The GRE Practice Problems Book is a valuable guide for students at any class who are studying for the updated GRE General Exam. Recently revised to more accurately reflect the complexities of the GRE test, this book provides more than 1,800 questions to provide detailed practise to students across 33 chapters and online. The problems in this book, established by our professional teachers, are sensibly divided into practise sets and mirror those contained in substance, type and design on the GRE. Via targeted practise, students can learn basic math and verbal skills, while easy-to-follow examples and step-by-step applications help cement their comprehension of the GRE-tested principles. In addition, with online question banks that offer practical, computer-based testing to help replicate the GRE test-taking experience, students can take their practise to the next stage. Links to an online video introduction, online GRE practise problems banks and the GRE Challenge Dilemma Archive are included with the purchasing of this book. 

Book Review:

One of the best sources of analysis for GRE is Manhattan GRE (MGRE). One feature they have always missed, though, is book-based practise questions, with their six online assessments containing much of their questions. Ok, this oversight has been more than resolved by the people over at MGRE. There are over 1,800 practise questions in the 5 lb Book of GRE Practice Issues.

Clearly, such a huge book calls for a massive review. I have broken up the analysis into Intro, Verbal (which is broken down into multiple kinds of questions) and Math so that you can come home to the section that is most important to you.

Intro to the GRE Practice Issues Book of 5 lb

It is no easy feat to construct a GRE query that mimics the real thing. This is especially the case for verbal words. It is a case of searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack to locate a reading comprehension passage that will pass ETS's strict requirements is challenging enough (each prospective passage must follow a certain amount of criteria, and even then does not make the final cut).

And if such a passage is discovered by a GRE content creator, there is no assurance that they will concentrate on the section of the passage that will be GRE. In the tone and manner of test authors, the possibility of writing a question makes producing material an ever more challenging challenge, if absolutely impossible. And let us not ignore those artfully designed distractors that can make a relatively simple question diabolical, or the wrong responses.

I assume it is fair to claim that no publisher would be able to produce a test which is indistinguishable from the actual result, at least for experts. Around the same time, you can just use prep content that gets as similar as possible to the original as a test taker. The underlying premise is that the closer the content is to the real thing, the more easily you can practise (and, by extension, the higher you can score).

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Manhattan GRE has done a fair job in this sense: you will get preparation content that approximates what you will find on the real exam. That is not to suggest that this book's questions are fine. It is clear that in this book many people wrote the questions, and therefore the standard is uneven, particularly in the verbal one. But with one notable exception (I will expand on below), your score GRE will not be harmed by using Manhattan's huge 5 lb book, and in some situations, particularly on the math portion, it will certainly help your score.

The Verbal The Verbal

Completions of Text

I've been grousing how the questions relied more on cryptic terminology since MGRE published its first TC/SE novel, you will never see on the exam, and less on complicated sentence structure. Fortunately, the phrases are not quite as cryptic in the Text Completions segment. There is also the occasional 'Myrmidon' (or two!) in there, so most of the words will possibly occur on the exam otherwise.

There are sentences that parallel what you'll find on the exam in terms of complicated form. Any questions, though, are nothing more than simple level expressions, e.g. (It was really <blank> outside, and so John was sweating) accompanied by ridiculously hard sentences (this is something Kaplan does).

The algorithm (for lack of a better word) used on the actual GRE does not mirror even questions written in sophisticated prose. That is, you won't have to decipher what the blanks ought to be depending on the context; instead, given the answer options, the word that goes in the blank is the only logical word, and given that you know the language. Many of the questions in the TC segment sound more like vocabulary drills than true GRE questions, considering the abundance of questions.

Equivalence Of Sentence

Typically, with TC I party SE. The SE questions in this novel, however, were significantly inferior to their counterparts in TC. Synonymous phrases sometimes did not result (two entirely separate meanings were created by 'to bedazzle' and 'to flabbergast'). The terminology might be ridiculously vague. One query was clearly written, for instance, but "bootless" was one of the correct responses, a term so mysterious that it would most likely never appear on today's GRE. In a sea of subpar questions, this is but one case.

There is an exception to what I have mentioned above in both the TC and SE questions: at the very back of the book, the verbal practise sets. The consistency of the questions here is better and the questions themselves are more closely parallel to what you would find on the real exam, except for the fact that the complexity applied to the questions is not consistent.

Comprehension Reading

It can be challenging, as I noted at the beginning, to locate passages that are somewhat close to those on the test. Again, barely 5lbs. In this case, the book is a mixed bag: some passages were suffused with the unmistakable GRE-ness; others were not that many. A particular section of the passage was answered by several questions, while GRE questions appear to deal with more general relevance.

I also thought that the Manhattan inference problems were very different from those written by ETS. I found that the MGRE questions were very literal and precise about the inference questions, while the latter want you to be able to articulate big-picture inferences. I may make an argument on why the attributed answer was not right because I used the MGRE reasoning on the ETS inference questions. My main problem here is that from the 5 lbs, students who just practise inference problems. The book can struggle with questions of inference on the GRE.

Arguments for paragraph

Ses questions were taken from the GMAT product from Manhattan, which is a positive thing. In forums where certain topics are discussed ad nauseam, such issues have stood the test of time. For test takers, it is positive news. Test day can certainly help with certain questions to exercise rational thinking. That said, the questions have a "flavour" subtly different from the ETS questions, but the conceptual structure is identical overall.

The Segment on Quantitative

The good news is that the math segment is so good that I don't need to waste another 1,000 words pontificating on the complexities of each form of question. Hundreds of GRE-like issues have been generated by MGRE that are easily split up into various pieces. Many topics ignored by other prep books-standard deviation, weighted averages, and combinatorics-are given their own section full of hundreds of practise concerns.

I also like how the explanations are clearly presented. With many books I feel like I often have to decode the explanation just to understand what should be a relatively simple problem. Those who wrote the MGRE explanations anticipated the difficulties students would typically have and clearly addressed them.

But I do have one quibble: the questions were not assigned difficulty levels. Therefore, students may become frustrated if they miss a string of questions, not knowing that those questions were tough questions, or overly confident if they hit a patch of easier questions. Breaking the questions based not just on type but on difficulty would have improved this book.