GRE Math Workbook

I last took the GRE in college but haven't been working with numbers since then. I needed an overall review. I found the book pretty useful in reviewing the basic concepts, especially the chapter on geometry. But I have to say there are unnecessary errors in the book that can be distracting. The book doesn't cover everything and there probably isn't one GRE book that will do that.

If you are like me then you are not going to purchase just one book to prepare for the GRE, but you are likely going to work through several books from a variety of companies. As I write this, I have already worked through Kaplan's GRE Premier Edition and Princeton Review's How to Crack the GRE for the general idea of the test, and now I am turning my attention to the subject specific GRE books for further refinement. Barron's GRE Math Workbook was first on my list of such books, and I am happy to report that despite a few typos this book is well worth the time and the energy to work through it. The two general review books I mentioned above from Kaplan and Princeton Review focused mainly on how to identify trick questions or how to implement peculiar strategies, such as dumping the possible answer choices back into the question statement to find the answer, rather than satisfactorily reviewing the math you are supposed to know to solve the problems directly. The great thing about the GRE Math Workbook is that it reviews the math directly while at the same time it introduces you to problem specific tricks that will help you solve problems faster. It does this by first focusing on the straightforward way to solve certain math problems, and then it adds in the tricks once you have already reviewed the basics. At the end of each small section you are given a small quiz of about 8 fairly straightforward problems to solve. These make sure you grasp the basic math concepts. These problems are usually followed by about 10 GRE level problems that use the same math, but are now a bit trickier to solve. I have found the format works well for the most part, with the only criticisms being that some of the more obscure topics (such as permutations and combinations) were left out and that the problems as a whole seemed a bit too easy in most sections (but maybe this just means that I am getting better at solving them?). A lot of the tricks introduced in this book are very useful. They really helped me solve certain types of problems that I was still having trouble with even after working completely through the other two books. For example, I have never seen any other book mention that you can factor an exponential number such as 10^8 into two terms such as (2x5)^8 which then distributes to (2^8)(5^8). Now that I know that this is an option I use it all the time to cancel quantitative comp questions that deal with large exponents. These problems I was really struggling with before reading this book; I used to have to resort to multiplying things out to get the answer which simply wasted a lot of precious time. Example problems always follow each new idea that is introduced, so you can immediately see how some of these strange new approaches to math can be applied to solve a GRE question. The only major gripe is that a few typos pop up here and there throughout the book as you work through it. These are usually related to the wrong symbols being placed in bet