I bought this book for my daughter to prep for the PSAT and Act and she said of all the study materials she had, this was the best book ever! It not only explained the answers throughly but it was challanging and had materials that were very much related to these tests.

I teach SAT prep/review classes independently, and have been using the Barron's workbook for several years. The material is challenging, and provides students with a large number of high-frequency SAT words used in context. The vocabulary lists, root origins of words, and practice tests are all excellent.
Kate Connors,
Holliston MA

This is good but it's almost exactly the same as SAT Critical Reading. No need to buy both. The Verbal SAT book is better as it has a grammar section.

I get 200 point more at self SAT exam,after I did all problems in this book.

Obviously, this book can not be your only guide to the SAT;it only covers a third of it. But it does a very thorough job with the Critical Reading section. The sentence completion practice tests (4 tests per set, 3 different difficulty level sets) are very close to the real College Board ones. The reading comprehension pieces are decent; nothing amazing, but as good as close to the real SAT as you can find.

The most valuable part of this book (for the average person), is the comprehensive vocabulary list. It consists of 800 words (80 sets of 10 words). Being very familiar with the actual SAT, I can say that the words on the list are indeed very high-frequency SAT words. If you know every word on that list it would be hard to answer more than 2 sentence completion questions incorrectly on the real SAT. For the vocabulary list alone, the book is worth the buy.

The work books provide the extra practice needed to improve preparedness for the SAT. As a supplement for the SAT guide they are very valuable.

HEY i'm a highschool junior and I had a projected 650 for the SAT critical reading from the PSATs but i worked through the practice sections (and there are A LOT of good practices in this book) and got a 740 after 2 weeks working through this book on the actual SAT. so yeah, it's definitely helpful. It also has a lot of good vocabulary practice and tip and several critical reading practice tests.

This book is great! It has several practice passages, and the questions are really good. They adhere to the SAT format, and the answer choices are challenging, yet fair. The additional sentence completion exercises and prefix and root sections are really useful in SAT preparation. The only drawback to this book is that it uses many of the same sentence completion questions that you will see in their other test books, namely the Verbal Workbook for the SAT and the GRE test prep book. Other than that, the book is excellent.

This book is great! It has several practice passages, and the questions are really good. They adhere to the SAT format, and the answer choices are challenging, yet fair. The additional sentence completion exercises and prefix and root sections are really useful in SAT preparation. The only drawback to this book is that it uses many of the same sentence completion questions that you will see in their other test books, namely the Verbal Workbook for the SAT and the GRE test prep book. Other than that, the book is excellent.

I'm an after-school tutor, and teach general English to Aussie school students. I use all the Barron's SAT workbooks to help improve the students' vocabulary, writing, comprehension and reading. This "Critical Reading Workbook" is great, with plenty of practice in sentence completion, comprehension questions and vocabulary extension. The practice exams at the back of the book are excellent for mastering exam technique, and the explanation section for the answers is very helpful. English is never taught this way in Australia, but it should be. All my students feel they learn more from studying one Barron's workbook than they do from doing a whole year of English lessons at school.

A very adequate Book!

This book covers various types of questions for the Reading sectoin and the Writing section. It has lots and lots of practice for reading section but could have more for writing (the practice tests on the back can cover that).

It breaks down the reading section into two sections for each type of questions: Sentence completion and Reading. It has all the information you need for each section and tons of practice questions for you to improve your skills.

Writing section is analyzed with many questions that contain the most common types of grammatical errors that are tested on the test. If you learn all those types and practice with the practice tests, you should do fairly well on the test.

For the essay part, it gives bunch of useful tips along with some sample essays with grader's comments.
This book also has the SAT High-frequency word list with 800 words that frequently appear on the SAT.

It doesn't have any useless information so doesn't overprepare you. It has just everything a SAT verbal workbook should have. Therefore, I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Other Books:
Princeton Review's Reading and Writing workbook is very short and inadequate. I wouldn't recommend it.
Kaplan's SAT reading workbook has tons of problems and so that book's pretty good.
Kaplan's SAT Writing workbook isn't as thorough as Barron's but it's good enough to give it a try.
For studying SAT overall I would strongly recommend the Maximum SAT which is the best SAT prep Book I have seen. It is really helpful to study along with the Official SAT Study Guide by collegeboard.