Graduate Record Exam (GRE) is a must-take for anyone who aspires to postgraduate study, and it creates more queasy stomachs, pounding headaches, and general anxiety than anything since the SAT! The... This description may be from another edition of this product.
Some parts are great, LOTS of typos in math section
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
Written by a test writer, it certainly -feels- like you're getting insider tips. I haven't taken the GRE yet, so I can't say whether it's truly useful. The text is easy and fun to read, and the chapters are organized well. The content is straightforward to work through and the tips and strategies are highlighted well. The thing I don't like, and it's a big thing, is the quantity of typos in the math section. There are mistakes in the formulas (yikes!) and in the answers and explanations. For example, page 200 lists the surface area of a cube as 486 for a side length of 8 AND for a cube with a side length of 9. Page 202 gives information about a triangle: lengths of two sides and one angle. The problem asks you to estimate the length of the third side. Yes, it's an estimation, but the answer is nothing near the two lengths the third side could be, when calculated. (There are two possibilities given the setup -- one where the sides are more equal, and one where the third side is very short, but the answer tells you to pick something in the middle. Drawing it out by hand and modeling it with mathematical software give the same results -- and neither are what the book says is the answer.) On page 219, there's a function with an equal sign in the numerator: f(x)=1 -------- 1-x^2 On page 220, the formula for finding the midpoint between two points is listed as (x1 - x2)/2, (y1 - y2)/2 but the minus signs should really be plus signs. I consider that a serious error, since someone who doesn't know the formula will be misled. This review is of a 2007 edition. If they revise, much more attention needs to be paid to the math proofreading, and at a minimum they should fix the few problems mentioned above. (And will they send me an honorarium for catching these mistakes? :-) )
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