Geometry GMAT Preparation Guide

This and all the other Manhattan GMAT guides were really helpful in helping me prep for the GMAT. My colleagues had recommended them over other guides and I continue to do the same after getting the score I needed on my first try.

The Manhattan series was the most helpful for me on my GMAT because other GMAT prep books only shows time saving or test taking tips but does not go into details about the various topics which I needed because I don't have a strong quantitative base. In fact, I didn't know even the basic idea of number properties or even odd plus odd is even (must have been asleep in math class) and so these guides were a must for me. Except for the critical reasoning guide, I give them all five stars +++! Too bad I found these guides too late (just 2 weeks before the exam) and by the time they arrived in the mail, I didn't have time to do any of the practice exercises but I still managed to improve my score from 500 to 640 from just skimming through these guides. 640 may not be a high score, but for someone who didn't know what a cube root is two weeks before the exam, these guides sure did a good job getting me up to speed. In my situation, these guides were heaven sent. If you're really good with math then they might be too easy and too basic for you. Even then, they would still serve as a nice 'refresher'. They are short and concise and it only took me about an hour or less to skim through each and so they are pricey if you're just using them for a quick review. But if you don't know math like I don't know math, BUY THEM ALL!!! THEY ROCK!

The geometry portion of GMAT has become much more difficult over the years. GMAT rarely test the basics (what is an area of a triangle?), but GMAT tests such things as "find the midpoint of a perpendicular bisector of a line with with equation y=mx+b". The explanation of triangles and all its intricacies are explained in detail, such as a height of a triangle can be any perpndicular side of a base of a triangle even though the height is external to the triangle. The book really shines in coordinate geometry. It provides very good explainations of finding intersection of two lines and perpendicular bisectors. I highly recommend this book to those who are preparing for GMAT.

Quantitative section on the GMAT can be a little tricky, even if you were pretty good at Math in your high school or in college. Why? Because the skills tested on the GMAT are different than the one you acquired in high school or college. For example, the data sufficiency section is not a straightforward problem solving section and requires some targeted practice before you take the real thing. I am an engineering major and I took multiple advanced Math courses in my college and yet, I benefited from the Manhattan Review quantitative books. So even if you think that you know everything that there is to know about the Geometry knowledge tested on the GMAT, it doesn't hurt to review some concepts and practice some additional questions. Like I said, it helped me a lot. Of course, like with everything else on the GMAT, you need to practice a lot so you will benefit from this book only if you have sufficient time to practice. If your GMAT is in a week's time, this book is probably not for you.

"Very good for the target audience" - I think this sums it all. If you are someone who has not done active maths for some time now, and therefore does not remember the concepts involved very well, this is the book for you. This I will say holds true for most of the books of the Manhattan Quant series. The Manhattan Quant series books cover the concepts only to the degree that gets asked in the GMAT, and do not overwhelm you. Plus, as each of the Manhattan books then turns to the Official Guide for practice, each of the books has a section where the appropriate questions for that topic are numbered from the OG. They also detail the toughest of the lot from OG. Here I think the book is useful for anyone, irrespective of the personal comfort level with maths. Therefore if you are true to yourself and practice the questions marked from OG as you go along, this would prove to an excellent resource for cracking the quant part of the GMAT.