dchow08

lowriders715: the answer is as many as you can. You should be reading good books that interest you. Right now I'm reading Anna Karenina (pevear translation), and it's really good. But I'm doing so because I like the book. I took the SAT already. Make sure you try to read the newspaper or Time or National Geographic or whatever. I like the Atlantic monthly and the New York Times. The goal is to become a good reader. You've kind of shot yourself in the foot if you haven't read any real literature for most of your life and are trying to catch up because you want to do well on the SAT.

Poisonous

Take a **** load of timed practice SATs and study the answers you got wrong. It will raise your score much faster than reading a bunch of books, although I would encourage you to do that as well.

pplprsn

Better make a habit of reading for pleasure at least an hour (2 hrs is better) before bedtime, and keep this going from now on. Not during exam week, of course.
the more you read, the better your reading comprehension, but reading comprehension improves SLOWLY. You have to be patient and stick to the reading habit for several years.
You know, the point of SATs is to assess where your reading comprehension level is. The bigger picture here is that if you don't comprehend that well, as evidenced by an average SAT score, college reading is going to go slowly. So start reading every chance you get from now on and go for quantity of time--3 hours at a stretch, that sort of thing, esp this summer. That is the only sure way to improve in reading comprehension, which will then be borne out by your SAT test performance.

What to read: try John Grisham's stuff, Madame Curie by Eve Curie, Nickel and Dimed (that book is scary). Experiment with whatever will absorb you, since you haven't done a lot of reading for fun and don't know your tastes. I will say that anything will help your comprehension, believe it or not. Easy reading works as well as tomes. Since you want to hurry along, try to find books with a fair amount of unfamiliar vocabulary. What my husband did was write down the word as he came to a new one, then looked it up later.

You do have to be patient. Our culture doesn't encourage reading for fun, and you didn't realize that this was going to slow down your reading comprehension and affect your SAT scores. This is a common problem, esp for folks who like math.

Try The Day of the Triffids. Gripping story about carnivorous plants that walk that escape from a research lab and take over the Earth.

JexteLox

reading seems like a good option, but its not necessary for a good CR score.

there are some techniques and strategies that can get you a higher score.

one of them, is to cross out the "extreme" answers; the answers that have "always" , "totally" , "every", "all" etc.

CR, is in fact, a test of how well you understand what is being asked. The Answers are MORE important than the questions! The passage is simply a "fact" bank to answer the questions. You actually do not need to read the entire passage to get any question- just the parts that are referred to by the Questions.


Anyways. buy a strategy guide. i suggest Princeton Review or McGraw Hill.

They will help improve your score.

hookem168

Like a few others have said, there is only one solution:
READ. I don't mean Harry Potter, or even the newspaper.
I mean Thoreau. Dickens. Shakespeare. Keep a reading journal and jot down your impressions/thoughts of the works you read. It'll both increase your vocab and teach you to understand texts.

Ashraf Eassa

I don't think you need to read in the classical sense to do well on SAT CR. The girl in my english class who read every book assiduously, wrote "beautiful" essays on what she read, and in addition read books for fun scored a 700 reading. Respectable, but not as good as my 760. I never read books (even required for school -- I sparknotes), never read word lists, and basically only ever read SAT passages to prepare.

So, yeah, just do practice tests. At this stage, you don't have time to read novels.

hookem168

yes, but ashraf, you may be a naturally better test-taker than your friend. With her test-taking skills, but no reading, you might've made a 550.

2boysima

If you think strategy is your issue, then take more practice tests, and try to figure out what you did right when you were able to eliminate some choices and answer right, versus when you were able to eliminate some choices but answered wrong.

Since the reading passages are short, I've noticed that on the Parents forum, many suggest reading newspapers and magazines, rather than books -- especially if reading books is not a passion. You need to read...and it's easier to get through magazine articles than classic literature. The daily New York Times, the Sunday New York Times magazine, and the articles in New Yorker Magazine seem to be among the most suggested. (Newsweek, Time and many local papers don't use the vocabulary and sentence structure required to actually increase your knowledge much above 6th grade reading level....)

t-san

The answer is practice. I rose my CR score from a 660 to an 800 in about 2 months. I got a bunch of review books and pretty much ignored Math and Writing (I was scoring well there), and just focused on CR. Since 1 test takes like 3.75 hrs - if you only do the CR in the book it should only take about 1hr. Go over the corrections in depth and find out why you miss the problems. Reading magazines is useful, but it won't help you figure CR out quickly. Intensive practice is the way to go. Secondly, don't memorize vocabulary, understand vocabulary. There is no way you're going to learn every single word: this is one thing that I figured out early on. Really, if you understand how the questions work, you can figure out most of the 18 questions. There, you should be aiming not to miss any, that way you'll have more leeway on the actual reading later on.

This is what I mean about not memorizing: you can learn 10,000 new words, but if the word verisimilitude shows up, 98% of people miss it. However, using roots and prefixes, you can break words down into veri - meaning truth, simi- meaning similar or same, and tude - meaning of or related to. Thus, the word vaguely means how similar something is to the truth, or original. That word showed up on a practice test I did, but I was able to get it because rather than spending precious time trying to learn all the words, I spent my time trying to understand them.

On the actual reading part there are tons of tricks to use, I learned a whole lot from the review books I bought. Try that, and I'm sure your score will increase.

rmadden15

^ Verisimilitude is one of my fav words, so I would not forget it.