Because of the importance of the SAT to college admissions, there are literally hundreds of test preparation courses available. Most focus on simply having you do test questions over and over again so that you learn to recognize question styles and simply become comfortable with taking the test. While these techniques can improve your scores, they aren’t always enough to introduce you to the new types of vocabulary you’ll be expected to recognize on the test. These five tips can help you improve your vocabulary and prepare to face the SAT.
Five Tips To Improve Your SAT Reading Score
- Read a wide variety of articles and books. Just reading material that is different from the books, magazines and schoolwork you usually look at can be enough to raise your test score by several points. You don’t even need to go out of your way to find this sort of material. Your parents probably read several magazines that you typically find uninteresting.
- Read every day. If you’re like most students, you’re preparing for the SAT weeks ahead of time. That window can be put to good use by preparing just a little every day. Reading a newspaper or magazine article every day is ideal.
- Look for similar roots in words, especially if you take a second language. While many test prep courses focus on teaching you the meanings of the roots of words, recognizing similar words can be enough. And, if you take a second language — especially a Romance language like Spanish or French, you’ll have a big boost.
- Look up the meanings of unfamiliar words. No matter how many vocabulary words you learn to recognize, they won’t do you any good if you can’t remember what the word means. Since most of us don’t carry dictionaries around with us, it might be worth writing down the words you encounter throughout the day and checking them all at once at the end of the day. Just typing your new words into Dictionary.com will get you all the definitions you need.
- Go through a few practice tests. Just a few, mind you — you don’t really need the hundreds of questions a test prep course might subject you to. The SAT’s website even gives you one new question a day, as well as a whole stack of free test materials.
SAT Reading Prep is Easy
You don’t need to spend hours every day, not to mention thousands of dollars, to prepare for the SAT. The reading section is one of the easiest to prepare for, because it focuses on vocabulary and basic grammar.
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