Max's Planet

In 2008 I tried to pass toefl exam. For this purpose I bought Kaplan TOEFL IBT book. What can I say about it? In Amazon I red many positive comments, that’s why I bought this book. Also a couple of CD’s were attached to the book (they can be easily found in the Internet for example in torrent). What was inside the book? Authors describe rules, time and all the condition of the exam. Then for each part of the exam they gave some advises, an optimal strategy and a practice material. At first glance it looks reasonable and useful. But now let’s consider this from practical point. From psychology we know that in stressful situations (such as an exam) the only skills that are “hard coded” into your brain can be used. By “hard coded” I mean the skill (experience) that can be used automatically for example, if you have good fighting skills than in certain ruff situation you will be able to use it, otherwise there is no chance that you will learn or remember something in such situation (however in many Hollywood movies in stressful conditions the opposite situation is shown). So, my point is that all the advises and strategies are useless and you would not be able to use any of them unless you memories them and could use them automatically (to do this you have to spend  a lot of your time, really a lot). Practice material is useful but you can find the similar one on CD. In my opinion this book is useless. However I found another book which I think it gives you exactly what you need to know, it is Mcgraw Hill 400 Must-have Words for the TOEFL.

So if you want prepare yourself to toefl, the following stuff may be useful for you

-          Practice CD (not very important from which book, just any up-to-date practice material can help )

-          Reading English books

-          Book: 400 Must-have Words for the TOEFL