Veritas Guide – 0 (Math Essentials)
Few days back, I started my journey with Veritas guide – 0 (Math Essentials). The book provides in-depth coverage of the mathematical fundamentals one will see on the GMAT. Everything mentioned in the book is essential to perform strong on GMAT and book is designed to helps you to absorb further tough concepts tested on GMAT.
The book starts with the “Math Essentials Diagnostic Test” that consists of 48 questions and covers almost all the topics. The book is designed to build strong fundamentals of mathematics.
Total questions: 200+ (include examples, drills and many more!)The Good:
1. Each chapter in the book starts with giving explanation on the specific question types, then in each chapter there are examples making life easy for test takers and finally chapter ends up with about 10 (sometimes more than 10) questions in drill. I think this is the best way to make things easy and Veritas knows this very well.
2. Book covers all the topics, such as, Divisibility, Fractions, Decimals, Percentages, Algebra, Solving Equations, Inequalities, Exponents, Roots, Quadratic Equations, FOIL & Factoring, Conversions, Word Problems, Lines and Angles, Triangles, Quadrilaterals, Circles, Coordinate Geometry and many more topics those are tested one GMAT. Book builds strong foundation for higher score!
3. Book not only gives concepts but also provides general information on the test i.e. how one should tackle this beast – GMAT. “Facts and formulas”, “How your mind works”, “Lazy genius” and “GMAT Insider” on the side-note make book worth going through.
4. Book gives some interesting information, which I think one won’t get in any other book e.g. “in inequalities why the sign must be flipped when dividing or multiplying by negative number”? The book gives answer to this tricky question in simple word. We know that 2 > 1, when we multiply by -1 (minus 1) it results in -2 > -1, but we know this result is wrong as -2 is farther from 0 than -1. So, we need to flip the sign whenever we are multiplying or dividing by negative number. (I confess that I have never thought over this ever!!)
The Bad:
1. Results of Math Essentials Diagnostic Test” should have given some performance level of one, some analysis of results or something like if one has score above 40 out of 48, one is at 600 level etc.
2. More explanations should have been given to the drills. The book has skipped explanations on various drills. I think adding explanations to all the drill questions would have added more value to the book.
3. There are few printing mistakes in the book. On page number 80, in topic “multiplication”, there is a misprint and instead of writing a1 x a2 = a1+2 = a3 , a1 + 2 is written. Also, on page number 124, in question number 9, I don’t think we can arrive at term R = 4/360 in any case (am I missing something?).
The Final Note:
In this book, I can’t complain about the wastage of papers on book as book is packed with information, problems and more problems! Book gives superb introduction for the Quant section and makes one ready for tougher problems. The book is definitely building block of success on Quant section. I’ll give this book 4.5 out of 5.