Barron's SAT Critical Reading Workbook

I bought this book for my daughter to prep for the PSAT and Act and she said of all the study materials she had, this was the best book ever! It not only explained the answers throughly but it was challanging and had materials that were very much related to these tests.

Obviously, this book can not be your only guide to the SAT;it only covers a third of it. But it does a very thorough job with the Critical Reading section. The sentence completion practice tests (4 tests per set, 3 different difficulty level sets) are very close to the real College Board ones. The reading comprehension pieces are decent; nothing amazing, but as good as close to the real SAT as you can find. The most valuable part of this book (for the average person), is the comprehensive vocabulary list. It consists of 800 words (80 sets of 10 words). Being very familiar with the actual SAT, I can say that the words on the list are indeed very high-frequency SAT words. If you know every word on that list it would be hard to answer more than 2 sentence completion questions incorrectly on the real SAT. For the vocabulary list alone, the book is worth the buy.

The work books provide the extra practice needed to improve preparedness for the SAT. As a supplement for the SAT guide they are very valuable.

HEY i'm a highschool junior and I had a projected 650 for the SAT critical reading from the PSATs but i worked through the practice sections (and there are A LOT of good practices in this book) and got a 740 after 2 weeks working through this book on the actual SAT. so yeah, it's definitely helpful. It also has a lot of good vocabulary practice and tip and several critical reading practice tests.

I'm an after-school tutor, and teach general English to Aussie school students. I use all the Barron's SAT workbooks to help improve the students' vocabulary, writing, comprehension and reading. This "Critical Reading Workbook" is great, with plenty of practice in sentence completion, comprehension questions and vocabulary extension. The practice exams at the back of the book are excellent for mastering exam technique, and the explanation section for the answers is very helpful. English is never taught this way in Australia, but it should be. All my students feel they learn more from studying one Barron's workbook than they do from doing a whole year of English lessons at school.