<p>The Test Takers 400 word box I use, also read hard, challanging texts a lot</p>
<p>ZhangLynn, buy DirectHits and memorize the words there. For example you can study 50 words/day so you would be ready in 10 days. If you want to you could study and the vocabulary from RocketReview. So you should study about 700 words so if you are assiduous you would have a nice score on SC.</p>
<p>I have the book Up Your Score and in that they have a vocab list with a mnemonic or a pun for most of the words to help you memorize. I’m working on it right now and it’s pretty easy that way.</p>
<p>does anyone know where I can find a website with roots to study from? (also prefixes and suffixes)
thank you</p>
<p>no one? …</p>
<p>I think its silly to memorize words. Learn them. I did above average for HS seniors on the SAT’s CR section when I was in the 6th grade. Why? Because I learned words. I studied. When I wrote papers I incorporated my new vocab. I used it in everyday conversation. Then again, I like words. “Syzygy,” with its alternating pattern of y’s and consonants, excites me. I love how happy “ebullient” sounds and that “pulchritude,” despite its meaning, does not sound very beautiful.</p>
<p>I read the Wall Street Journal a lot, and I think that definitely helps. It has some great vocab. If you have the time to read complete novels as opposed to short news articles, you’ll get exposed to even more vocab. For two years or so, every day when I came home from school, I would sit down in the kitchen and read the WSJ while having a snack, writing down all the words I did not fully understand. I still have all those little sheets I use and sometimes I look back and am amazed by what I didn’t know. Just read. It’s immensly helpful.</p>
<p>And having taken Latin for 3 years (required by my school) definitely helps. It didn’t stop me from missing that demagogue/prognosticator question on the PSAT this year though. But that was a stupid mistake. I knew I had it wrong. I’m still upset about it, especially because my CR score was 8 points lower than I wanted it to be.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, not everyone has the money, the time, or the interest to go and read something. Speaking for my self, I simply don’t like unnecessarily reading novels. I don’t exactly like memorization either; but for me, it’s one of the more effective ways of remembering words. After a while, the mind doesn’t always remember what words they can use when writing or speaking. Currently, I’ve been alphabetically going through Sparknotes’s list of 1,000 SAT words and taking down every set of fifty words that I don’t know or am unsure about. So far, I remember two sets of words very well. The third set is being reviewed.</p>
<p>I agree to a large extent with the reading since childhood argument. I’ve been reading books meant for people 2-3 years older than me since 3rd grade and hit 750 CR with little prep.</p>
<p>I’d like to repeat advice I gave months ago: when you encounter a word you don’t know, look it up in the dictionary, and read all the definitions and the examples. This will help you understand what it means in context, and you will be more likely to remember it. And again, understanding the basic definition of a word is not the same as understanding how to use it correctly.</p>
<p>I’ve read a lot since the day I was born but never looked up words I didn’t know. Also, a lot of the words that are common on the SATs aren’t anywhere else. Mawkish? Mendacious? I’ve already seen both of those in the Blue Book and had no idea what they meant, but voila, here they are on the vocab list I’m currently studying.</p>
<p>I can teach myself approximately four words a minute off the list and then forget the meanings of about one quarter of those. Then I go back and pound those into my head for an extra 15 seconds each.</p>
<p>So on average I’m learning a word per 19 seconds. That’s a lot more than I’d learn from reading, and it’s helping me a fair amount in the Blue Book.</p>
<p>However, that doesn’t mean I’m writing off reading as a way to study. Words gleaned from books are far more easy to pull from your mind and use in an essay than those memorized off a list.</p>
<p>But here’s where you have to be careful. Let’s say your flashcard says that “mendacious” means “lying or untruthful.” This might lead you to write that “Carl was mendacious when he told me he passed algebra.” These mini-definitions can trick you into thinking that the word is a synonym for the definition, but that isn’t always true. Again, you could replace “lying” with mendacious in some cases, but not in others. At least read and understand the whole definition.</p>
<p>Yep, that’s correct. That’s why I mentioned reading as a better study tool for essay writing. When it comes to the vocab questions in CR though, studying off the list is working great for me.</p>
<p>There are many ways to memorize words.The best is read more stuff and make fash cards.
They become handy .I have followed tips and suggestions from
[Improving</a> Vocabulary Home](<a href=“http://www.improvingvocabulary.org/]Improving”>http://www.improvingvocabulary.org/)</p>
<p>Read. And vocab is not a huge part of the test anyway, its maybe a third of one section. Just by reading I got a 760 in CR with no prep when I was a sophomore, memorizing tons of obscure vocab will MAYBE get you one or two more questions right.</p>
<p>I just study stems and then use a good sense of guessing on the test supplemented wtih vocab I know</p>
<p>Memorize roots. It helps a lot because then you can use the roots to determine the meaning of words you have never seen before. Also memorize words in groups and if the words are generally used in a good or bad sense.</p>
<p>yea, i go with the roots. it’s hard to memorize so many words…but with roots, if you don’t know a word, you can definitely eliminate it down to one or two choices.</p>
<p>I took latin for two years and somewords have definitive latin roots that make it easy to decipher the definition.
In general, I memorized the Barron’s vocab list through flashcards and trying to implement such words into my essays.
If a simple word like “cat” or “ray” is in your word, you can think of a way to relate those two words, therefore making it easier to memorize.
Finally, I can’t stress enough how important it is to memorize a good number of vocab words and they DO show up in reading passages and a good number of questions.
Best of luck!</p>
<p>I dont agree that vocabulary is 1/3 of the CR score and 1/9 of the whole test .Vocabulary is completeky necassary in order to answer the passage questions correctly</p>
<p>^I see what you mean, but the typical passage vocab is not all that difficult. You won’t find obscure “SAT words” in that part of the test, at least I haven’t.</p>