Having a solid vocabulary is an indispensable tool for success for any person in their academic or professional career. Undoubtedly, the best way to increase your vocab would be to read challenging literature, but let’s face it: in today’s world sometimes it’s hard to find the time or the patience. Sadly, with the huge internet boom many people have replaced their time reading real “vocab-building” literature, with surfing the internet. While your average individual might end up reading the same quantity of words, the quality of the material read leaves a lot to be desired, as most websites aren’t thinking in terms of reading difficulty or vocabulary-building and usually won’t quite challenge a third-grader.
Tips -> Math -> Exponents
Exponents are basically just rules — know your rules and you can do anything; don’t know them, and you could stare at a question for an hour, and still get it wrong.
Links -> Grammar -> Idioms
Idioms are linguistic conventions in which certain words go with certain other words, and English is a particularly idiomatic language. Kids usually learn idioms in the sixth grade, and then forget about them until they have to study for the GMAT and other such tests.
Why Does Everyone Apply To The Same 20 Universities?
Many people choose what school they want to go to using pretty limited (and sometimes irrelevant) criteria:
1) The prestige factor — being able to namedrop Harvard every chance you get.
2) For a family legacy — going to Duke because your dad went to Duke, and his dad, and his dad, and his dad. And your kids’ll have to go too.
3) Distance — It’s close to home, OR it’s far away from home.
4) It has a program you’re especially interested in
5) It might have the extra-curricular activities you are looking for (a good crew team, a club scene, whatever).
Links -> Vocab Tools 2
Beef up your vocabulary and save the world at the same time! FreeRice donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program every time you get a word right. Not only will you be helping out the needy, which is its own reward, the wordgame is actually pretty addictive.
If you set up a profile on the website, it’ll keep track of all the words whose definitions you knew, and those you missed, so the test adapts to your vocabulary. The more words you get right, the harder the words it’ll throw at you, making it one of the better vocab tools available.
How To Build Good Study Habits
Many students struggle with schoolwork, especially when mid-terms or finals are looming on the horizon — it all adds up and can get difficult to manage. This usually happens because students don’t regularly keep up with the work, and only study when an assignment or test is due. The following tips should help you organize your life a little better and that should eventually result in a higher GPA.
Links: Vocab Tools 1
Online dictionaries as vocab tools:
Use the Merriam-Webster website to really get to work on your vocabulary. In addition to being an excellent free and online dictionary, Merriam-Webster also has an extremely useful word of the day option, making it one of the best vocab tools out there. They will send you a word every single day in your email. These will be words you’ll definitely need for your SAT but there will also be many rare words that you wouldn’t normally come across. Merriam-Webster will also give you the history and etymology of these words, which, trust us, is way more interesting than it sounds.
Links -> Standardized Test (SAT/ACT/GRE) Tools – The Premier Tutors
For help with standardized tests, you can’t go wrong with number2.com, in our humble opinion, among the best of its kind.
These guys offer help with every aspect of standardized tests — use tutorials and practice drills to get all your test questions answered, develop study strategies and build your vocabulary.
Best of all: it’s FREE!
Links -> Math at Math.com -> All-in-one
Anyone’s who’s struggling with math should definitely check out Math.com.
The website will help you with every last bit of math using tutorials so you can try your hand at practice questions for elementary math all the way to advanced trigonometry and financial calculations. It’s math help for all ages — check it out.