"Mr. Shin is my current writing teacher who has taught me for almost a year. If I were to study SATs by myself or with a tutor, I would use Mr. shin's book, "Mastering Core SAT Words." His book is different from other publishers because he used words that were used in the past SATs. Also it is currently published, its most updated with new vocabularies that many people are not familiar with. So if you are a student who is studying for SAYs, or just looking for handy word books to study from, I strongly recommend "Mastering Core SAT Words " Soojin Cho (Ridgefield Memorial High School) This book contains as many as 1,395 core SAT words long with synonyms, definitions and example sentences. In addition, in order to help SAT preparation students memorize the words more effectively, certain words have stars(*), which indicate the degrees of difficulty of memorizing the words. Based on my long term SAT teaching experience, SAT preparation students must precisely learn the definitions of the SAT words in this book to enhance their SAT Critical Reading Scores: particularly on the Sentence Completion and the Short Reading Passage sections. Once students have completed the memorization of al the words, they will be able to start dealing with questions related to the Long Passages more easily and efficiently. William H. Shin, Author