<p>Hi,</p>
<p>As of now, i’ve almost done with SAT words. I rarely miss anything on the sentence completion now. So my next step is to improve my reading speed. I’ve found that, with enough time for reading and thinking, i can get all the passage questions right easily. But without enough time added to the testing pressure, i don’t think as clearly and get things wrong. So I’m working on the reading speed now.</p>
<p>I’ve found mostly three things that’s slowing me down on the passages:</p>
<p>Vocab. There’s still some hard SAT vocab that I don’t know. I can figure out what they mean, but this process of figuring it out takes time. Then there’s the easy vocab part. There’s a lot of “easy” words on the SAT, that if you’re born in this country, you’d know without a doubt. But for an ESL student, it’s hard or almost impossible without first specifically studying those words. They mess up my understanding of the passage and take up valuable time in a way that probably even the collegeboard didn’t thought of. One example is the word mime in one of CB’s Blue Book tests. It’s in a paired passage, one about silent movies and the other about mimes, basically saying how the audience has to get involved. So not knowing what mimes are is like reading description of something without knowing what you’re reading about, and that kills the passage. Well, not that much, but it definitely hinders my way to understand the relationship between the 2 passages. At first I thought mimes are some kind of magician or stage actor, then I thought they were the actors in those silent movies. This definitely stumbles me in one of the comparisons questions: i thought, both are about silent movies and its actors and audiences!</p>
<p>So basically what I’m looking for is something like a Children’s (picture) dictionary, or ESL’s dictionary for the american culture, something like that. I’ve looked through my local library’s ESL section. Mostly they’re picture dictionaries and grammar books that are really easy, or too technical like telling you which flower is which and the parts of an automobile. And i’ve yet to find the word “mime” in any of those books. </p>
<p>So my question is, anyone knows any book in this subject that is concise and plentiful in its word selections?</p>
<p>The other 2 things that hinder my reading are minor. One is the tough sentence structures, but i’ll just read a grammar book (i need help on writing anyways) then practice reading a lot of the passages. More practice to beat the convoluted ideas those passages. </p>
<p>Anyways, thanks for any response in advance.</p>