 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | The Critical Reasoning Guide simplifies arguments by illustrating innovative diagramming techniques designed to increase comprehension and improve accuracy.Each chapter builds comprehensive content understanding by providing rules, strategies and in-depth examples of how the GMAT tests a given topic and how you can respond accurately and quickly. The Guide contains a total of 70 'In-Action' problems of increasing difficulty with detailed answer explanations. The content of the book is aligned to the latest Official Guides from GMAC (12th edition).
Special Features:
Purchase of this book includes one year of access to Manhattan GMAT's online Critical Reasoning Question Bank (accessible by inputting a unique code in the back of each book). |
Average Customer Rating:   Just what you need to study for the GMAT This and all the other Manhattan GMAT guides were really helpful in helping me prep for the GMAT. My colleagues had recommended them over other guides and I continue to do the same after getting the score I needed on my first try. Not the finest of the bunch As one who teaches the GMAT for a living, has written around 250 Critical Reasoning practice questions and is presently working on a Critical Reasoning manual, one thing that I have found remarkable about the GMAT Critical Reasoning section is the lack of good guides or practice materials.
Part of this is due, I suppose, to laziness: GMAT test prep companies cater largely to the Anglo-American market, which is largely not worried about the Verbal portion. The Verbal section encompasses far more than simply language, however--this is not the TOEFL--and in order to break the 700 ceiling a firm mastery of Critical Reasoning is absolutely essential.
Manhattan GMAT's Critical Reasoning guide, like nearly every other one on the market, appears eager to reassure students that "no knowledge of formal logic is necessary" to ace the Critical Reasoning questions. That is true but unhelpful information: most people of whatever nationality are simply SLOPPY thinkers and sloppy readers and need a serious recalibration. Perhaps no questions hinge on your knowledge of the terms "modus ponens," "modus tollens," "affirmation of the consequent," or "denial of the antecedent," but most people do not realize just how many arguments contain serious flaws and accept them without thinking critically, rendering themselves unable to dig out the problem when faced with it.
Furthermore, the refusal to structure the lessons along the lines of deduction and formal logic lead Manhattan to ignore the widely accepted mathematical conventions for diagraming arguments and suggest a great many vague and confusing symbols to that end. Diagramming arguments is useful in some situations, but only if you recognize what a valid argument (modus ponens or modus tollens) should look like.
The classification of questions is okay, but the excessive focus on GMAT content at the expense of developing logical skill sets severely mars this book, as well as a great many others. Sadly, at the moment it is the best of the major prep books on the market. Clearly, the amount invested in pedagoigical development has not kept pace with the great salaries Manhattan GMAT teachers receive. Very helpful This book gave me the tools to organize the parts of an argument. I have also used number properties and sentence corrections. No other books in GMAT prep (I have tired numerous) have been able to provide skill building exercises and pinpoint problem areas. I highly recommend the entire series. Least helpful of their series The Manhattan series was the most helpful for me on my GMAT because other GMAT prep books only shows time saving or test taking tips but does not go into details about the various topics which I needed because I don't have a strong quantitative base. In fact, I didn't know even the basic idea of number properties or even odd plus odd is even (must have been asleep in math class) and so these guides were a must for me. Except for the critical reasoning guide, I give them all five stars +++!
Too bad I found these guides too late (just 2 weeks before the exam) and by the time they arrived in the mail, I didn't have time to do any of the practice exercises but I still managed to improve my score from 500 to 640 from just skimming through these guides. 640 may not be a high score, but for someone who didn't know what a cube root is two weeks before the exam, these guides sure did a good job getting me up to speed. In my situation, these guides were heaven sent.
If you're really good with math then they might be too easy and too basic for you. Even then, they would still serve as a nice 'refresher'. They are short and concise and it only took me about an hour or less to skim through each and so they are pricey if you're just using them for a quick review. But if you don't know math like I don't know math, BUY THEM ALL!!! THEY ROCK!
However, their critical reasoning gmat guide did not go into much detail than the chapters of other verbal gmat prep guides out there and so I did not feel it's price was justified at all! The other guides costs lest than this guide and covers all the verbal topics and comes with tips as well. It also arrived after my exam date so I returned it. Overall, good book Overall, this is a good book, with detailed and accurate explanations on methods and what to expect in the exam.
One thing can be improved though - the questions/quizzes. Very small portion of the questions are not really good ones. |  |
Select button not working? 
