Part I

Orientation

1 The SAT, The Princeton Review, and You

2 Cracking the SAT: Basic Principles

LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED!

You are about to unlock a vast repertoire of powerful strategies that have one and only one purpose: to help you get a better score on the SAT. This book contains the collected wisdom of The Princeton Review, which has spent more than 35 years helping students achieve higher scores on standardized tests. We’ve devoted millions of dollars and years of our lives to cracking the SAT. It’s what we do (twisted as it may be), and we want you to benefit from our expertise.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Premium Edition of Cracking the SAT. This edition comes chock-full of awesome online resources, including four more full-length practice tests, as well as videos, study guides, college admissions articles, and more. See “Get More (Free) Content” on this page for step-by-step instructions for accessing your exclusive Premium tools. Happy test prepping!

WHAT IS THE PRINCETON REVIEW?

The Princeton Review is the leader in test prep. Our goal is to help students everywhere crack the SAT and a bunch of other standardized tests, including the PSAT and ACT as well as graduate-level exams like the GRE and GMAT. Starting from humble beginnings in 1981, The Princeton Review is now the nation’s largest SAT preparation company. We offer courses in more than 500 locations in 20 different countries, as well as online; we also publish best-selling books, like the one you’re holding, and online resources to get students ready for this test.

Our techniques work. We developed them after spending countless hours scrutinizing real SATs, analyzing them with computers, and proving our theories in the classroom.

The Princeton Review Way

This book will show you how to crack the SAT by teaching you to:

The test is written by and administered by the College Board, and they know that our techniques work. For years, the test writers claimed that the SAT couldn’t be coached. But we’ve proven that view wrong, and they in turn have struggled to find ways of changing the SAT so that The Princeton Review won’t be able to crack it—in effect, acknowledging what our students have known all along: that our techniques really do work. (In fact, the College Board has recently admitted that students can and should prepare for the SAT. So there!) The SAT has remained highly vulnerable to our techniques. And the current version of the SAT is even more susceptible to our methods. Read this book, work through the drills, take the practice tests, and you’ll see what we mean.

Study!

If you were getting ready to take a biology test, you’d study biology. If you were preparing for a basketball game, you’d practice basketball. So, if you’re preparing for the SAT, you need to study and practice for the SAT. The exam can’t test everything you learn in school (in fact, it tests very little), so concentrate on learning what it does test.