Book Description

Master essential skills to ace even the toughest tests!

Do tests make you nervous? Don’t worry––you’re not alone. Imagine how you’ll feel when you’re ready to face any test confidently and fully prepared. This book will help you get there! How to Ace any Test shows you how to build efficient test-taking skills and score your best each and every time, whether it’s a surprise quiz or a final exam.

Featuring sample test questions of all types, tips for scheduling your time and remembering what you studied, and a checklist of top techniques, this hands-on guide includes 7 keys to Success that will help you improve your performance:

• Be Prepared
• Practice, Practice, Practice
• Tailor Your Studying Style
• Construct Winning Essays
• Master Your Test-Taking Strategies
• Take Control of Test Anxiety
• Improve with Experience

So get ready to improve your test-taking skills–and ace any exam that comes your way! ... Read more

Book Description

Ten years ago, Barbara Kingsolver published a first novel that is well on its way to becoming a classic work of American fiction. The Bean Trees is a book readers have taken to their hearts. It is now a standard in college literature classes across the nation and has been translated for a readership stretching from Japan to Romania.

When it was first published, however, its author was unknown. Word of mouth spread slowly among booksellers, librarians, critics and readers with a passion to share their favorite books. In The Bean Trees they found a spirited protagonist, Taylor Greer, who grew up in poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when Taylor heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time she arrives in Tucson, she has acquired a completely unexpected child and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

Most readers of The Bean Trees discovered the novel in its paperback edition. On the 10th anniversary of its first publication, HarperFlamingo is proud to offer readers this special hardback edition, redesigned to be easy on the eyes and priced to be accessible to every lover of good fiction. ... Read more

Reviews (319)

The Bean Trees
I read this book as a senior in high school. After reading many novels in my high school career I would have to say that Barbara Kingsolver does an outstanding job in portraying the struggles of a single mother on her own. Taylor the main character of the novel starts off by leaving her home in Kentucky to head west to try and start a new life of her own. On her journey out west she has many lifetime experiences that most people would not like to have. Although she did have these experiences she took them head on and never regreted the decisions that she had to make. The biggest experience for her and will last her the rest of her life was when someone gave her a baby girl because they could not take care of it anymore. Traveling with her and the new acquired passenger Turtle the two go through the good times and the bad times of life together in becoming an inseperable mother daughter combination in the end. This book was extremly touching and would not only appeal to single mothers but to all kinds, with problems they endure in life, as the different problems in life seem to always present themselves through out the novel but are solved with the love of someone or something in the end.

An Exciting Read
Unique in that the narrator and heroine, Taylor/Marietta isn't the typical flawed protagonist who learns self-confidence by getting a makeover or landing her dream man. In this book, Taylor already has a self-confidence that borders on cockiness and is full of spunk. She's a sweet, straight-talking narrator the reader grows to love. Her frankness is something readers will aspire to. Taylor travels to Tucson, takes charge of a young Native American girl, befriends and encourages an insecure new mother named Lou Ann, and meets Estevan and Esperanza, a couple from Guatamala living illegally in the states. The novel has a feminist slant, and is empowering that way. I got a bit bored with the subplot featuring Estevan and Esperanza, but for the most part was captivated. Told in the voice of Taylor, the novel is humorous and uplifting. The conversations are realistic and familiar, very real. Brimming with advice and inspiration.

The Bean Trees: Metaphors and Similies
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver is a book rich in metaphors and similes. It is a story about a young girl who escapes her small town, where most young people drop out of school, and the girls get pregnant. For Missy, these are not options. She buys herself a car and heads out for maturing experiences. Her first decision is that since she is starting a new life, she needs a new name, so she calls herself "Taylor." As she is driving, she tells herself she will stop and live in the city in which her car breaks down. This doesn't happen because along the way, she picks up a passenger, a little Native American baby. Now she has herself and the baby to worry about. She stops in Arizona and loves it. So, she decides to stay. It is in this town, she discovers friendship, love, responsibility, maturity, and the true meaning of family.

The physical descriptions in the book, while at times, may seem over done, are truely what make the book a vivid, potent journey. Before Taylors journey begins, she is working in a hospital and one of the girls she went to school with, but got pregnant and married, is brought into the hospital covered in blood, and Missy says she was, "...like a butcher holding down a calf on its way to becoming a cut of meat" (10). She also witnesses a tire blowing up and says, "... Newt Hardbine's daddy flying up into the air, in slow motion, like a fish flinging sideways out of the water. And Newt laid out like a hooked bass" (15). Then when she gets to Arizona, she see rocks that were "...stacked on top of one another like piles of copulating potato bugs" (47). These are just a few of the similies that enrich the story. She also uses metaphors in abundance to create a picture.

She compares driving in traffic during a hail storm as ...moving about the speed of a government check" (49). Kingsolver uses metaphors to compare some of the characters' lives. Taylor says "...but I had to give her credit, considering that life had delivered Sandi a truckload of manure with no return address" (89). In comparing a park she loves to visit, Taylor says, "Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels" (148). The best description comes in the combination of metaphor and simile in the description of the night-blooming cereus: "The petals stood out in starry rays, and in the center of each flower there was a complicated contruction of silvery threads shaped like a pair of cupped hands catching moonlight. A fairy boat, ready to be launched into the darkness" (249). The pictures are that vivid.

If you need a book that is rich in description using similies and metaphors, read The Bean Trees.

Not too good.
This book was not to interesting for me because of the plot.It started out interesting when they found Turtle but after that it got boring. Nothing else interesting happend.

Wonderful story
I was assigned to read this book for my 11th grade English class. I loved it so much that when it took the class two months to completely read it, I took it home and finished it in a couple of days.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a very descriptive book about love, motherhood, and just starting over. Definately a must-read! ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A great learning experience
This book allows the reader to get a basic knoledge of algebra, easily. ... Read more

Book Description

Oscar Wilde's classic tale of narcissism is rife with symbolism and classic themes. Beyond the critical approach, the story can simply be enjoyed on its own as a well-written tale of suspense and surprise. ... Read more

Reviews (181)

One of my all-time favorites
Oscar Wilde's only novel is one of the best books I have ever read. The story is fascinating, and one that most people have heard of--that Dorian Gray, a young, beautiful man, makes a fervent wish that he would never grow old, and that the portrait just painted by his artist friend would age instead. This occurs, leading Dorian down a path of debauchery and cruelty, most of which must have been too horrific for Oscar Wilde to go into detail without violating obscenity laws.

The book is a masterpiece in examining manipulation. The artist introduces Dorian to a friend, Lord Henry, who calls Dorian's attention to his beauty, and Dorian, formerly innocent and sweet, becomes vain. It is amazing to see just how potent the power of suggestion is, and this novel demonstrates it perfectly.

The writing is less than perfect. One chapter goes on and on about artifacts that Dorian has collected around the world, leaving the reader saying, "Okay, and who cares?" Wilde's prose is far from flawless, but the story is so engaging that the reader will be willing to overlook the imperfections and will be intrigued in spite of this.

A sub-Faustian tale of self-love and self-obssession
Though it's rather slow to get going in the initial chapters, Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" builds up into a splendidly effective piece, written in highly polished prose. Dorian Gray, who is suggestively described as "charming" and "beautiful" ... is painted by his friend and admirer, Basil Hallward. Dorian, a self-centered social luminary whose character is reminiscent of Narcissus, makes a bizarre sub-Faustian wish which tragically comes true: that his beautiful portrait may age, while he retains his youthful looks. The conclusion is disastrous, the culmination of a narrative containing elements of murder, suicide, blackmail, a confrontation in a grimy alley and an episode in an opium den. The characters are very well sketched out, particularly the triad of Dorian, Basil and the intellectual cynic, Lord Henry, Dorian's mentor and the mouthpiece of some of Wilde's most cutting amoral opinions. The style is, typically, marvellous, characterised by brilliant exchanges and aphoristic gaiety. Wilde lacerates English bourgeois culture, the conceptions of sin and virtue and the attitudes towards art of his time with tremendous aplomb. Some of his quips are patently snide, sometimes mysogynistic, as in: "Woman represents the triumph of matter over mind, while man represents the triumph of mind over morals." Oh, isn't that just despicable?! I love it!

Hopelessly Ambiguous or Unambiguously Hopeful?
Who knows? But right-wing orthodox Catholic monarchist readers will be required to steel themselves through the first two chapters which consist of a drawn-out slap fight between Elton John, Graham Norton and Ian McKellan. Now I like a cat-fight as much as the next guy, but a tussle among effete Brit cats with man parts is just icky. So the narcissistic homo-erotic banter opening the book was significantly under-appreciated by this reader. But after you get through those chapters the book gets much, much better.

It is difficult to maintain that the book represents a defense of amoral Aestheticism, since the embodiment of the aesthetic ideal, Dorian Gray, is shown to be a damned man. That is not to say that Wilde embraces Catholicism in the novel, as the narrator often posits confusing opinions on issues of conscience and sin. At times Wilde seems to suggest that only immoderate (quantitatively speaking) behavior is immoral; and yet, at other times, it appears some actions themselves ought to be avoided. Is Wilde acknowledging that there are exceptionless moral norms? And what is the reader to make of rotten Wotton, whose epigrammatic phrases seem so akin to Wilde's? Hallward points out that Wotton's cynicism is a pose. He never says a moral thing, but he never does a wrong thing. So are we to take his Wilde-isms seriously? Are we to take Wilde seriously? Wilde says art is neither moral nor immoral, yet Gray is poisoned by A Rebors, a book by another decadent author who, oddly enough, also converted to Catholicism. And then there's the picture itself, the fruit of Hallward's homosexual obsession, which is clearly cursed, in spite of its initial apparent beauty.

Wilde's protests notwithstanding, it is a book with a moral informing the reader that he cannot escape his conscience, that he cannot reject nature and nature's God, and that the wages of sin are death. But therein lies hope, for if God is to be believed regarding the wages of sin, then why should we doubt Him regarding our Redemption? Unfortunately, this message is made ambiguous by an author who, rather than unintentionally creating a distorted image of an idea that cannot be fully represented, intentionally peppers the novel with paradox for the sake of cuteness. But the Truth is not cute. He's terrifying, and Wilde knows better. Therefore the book is best left to the orthodox or the decadent. The lukewarm will simply be confused.

Overflowing with insights and quotations
Wilde's only novel contains some of the greatest dialogue of any literature written in the english language. There are few books that could be considered more quotable, and even fewer that could be considered more insightful. The novel is enjoyable even upon a cursory reading, but its splendor is revealed only when it is studied. Wilde reveals so much of himself in his art, and through reading of Wilde's biographies, plays, and the literature that inspired him, the reader becomes intimate with Oscar, and is able to understand him more throughly than most authors would allow from a study of their work. This is a piece I have truly enjoyed, and continues to be one of the premier pieces of English literature.

Bonafide classic
Beautiful on the outside, ugly on the inside. That's Dorian Gray and the symbolism couldn't be more relevant today. This is one of the reasons why this has remained and will continue to be a classic. I won't bore you with a summary of the plot. I'll simply ask that you please give this book a read. It's quick, it's short, it's exciting, it's thrilling, it's very well written and it's a good summer read - I promise. ... Read more

Book Description

Specifically tailored to California's standardized testing program for success in grades 3 through 6!As a result of the No Child Left Behind law, students and parents need to rely on expertly prepared practice to ensure success on California's required proficiency exam. Spectrum California Test Practice offers essential practice that is custom-designed to California's standardized reading, writing, and math tests for grades 3 through 6. Written in the actual language of California's standardized testing program, Spectrum California Test Practice features:-An easy-to-understand description of California's reading, writing, and math expectations for grades 3 through 6. -A complete explanation of California's Standardized Test of Achievement and Reporting (STAR). -Hundreds of practice questions modeled after the test. -On-the-spot strategies for tackling different types of questions. -Three practice tests and a final test for measuring success in each subject. -A self-scoring section to determine each student's mastery of skills.Today's testing stakes are high. Provide students and parents the cutting edge for California testing success with Spectrum California Test Practice! ... Read more

Book Description

Practice and gain confidence by working with actual test questions and answer sheets.

This workbook offers students:

• Skill lessons with test-taking clues and sample questions to help students become familiar with test formats and content
• Preliminary sample tests with guided instructions, followed by comprehensive practice tests.
• Confidence-building practice in reading, language arts, writing, basic skills, science, social studies, and math.
• An answer sheet that simulates the actual testing experience.

This workbook offers teachers:

• Correlations to state standards and standardized tests including TerraNova CAT™ and CTBS®.
• A comprehensive practice test for each subtopic.
• Skill lessons to use as independent work in centers, for homework, or as seatwork.

Book Description

Lessons focus on creative and expository writing using clearly stated objectives and pre-writing exercises. Essential reading skills are applied. Activities include main idea, sequence, comparison, detail, fact and opinion, cause and effect and making a point. 130 pages. Answer key included. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A Variety of Writing Exercises To Engage The Young Author
This writing book contains a wide variety of exercises to help the young author learn to express himself. Very simple to follow, this selection allows for independent work, with simple exercises at the beginning of a unit, followed with longer writing assignments based upon preceeding work. For families who may object to certain secular content, there are a few exercises you might wish to skip. Otherwise, this is a great resource. ... Read more

Book Description

Teach process writing with these stories about cultural adjustment. Each unit features a story with suggested questions, vocabulary, discovery draft, revision, a writer's checklist, and background about the narrator's culture.Grades 4-8 ... Read more

Reviews (1)

An Eye Opener
I love this book! I have used in my classroom to point out similarities and differences between cultures. I like the writing activities for each story. You can either use the whole set or adapt it to fit your needs. My students have enjoyed hearing aobut students their age from different cultures.

In fact, it was a bit hit at my ESOL class in Polk County, Florida! Many teachers wanted to get ahold of this book! Stock up!! ... Read more

Book Description

Provides everything children need to build multiple skills in language. Focusing on phonics, structural analysis and dictionary skills, this book also offers creative ideas for using phonics and word study skills in other language arts. Answer key included. ... Read more

Book Description

Brought to you by McGraw-Hill, the premier educational publisher, grades PreK-12, Spectrum Test Prep offers students essential preparation needed to achieve success on standardized tests.

This workbook offers students:
• Practice for state tests, including proficiency tests
• Actual test questions in reading, language arts, and math
• Strategies and techniques for answering different types of questions such as multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and choosing a picture to answer a question
• tips on identifying testing patterns, time management, and following directions
• A complete answer key

This workbook offers teachers and parents:
• An explanation of what standardized test are and why students may experience test anxiety
• Clear instructions to help use the book effectively
• Content to prepare for the most popular standardized tests

Book Description

In addition to well-thought-out essay prompts, writing exercises include "Identifying Sentence Errors," "Improving Sentences," and "Improving Paragraphs."

These multiple choice questions are based on those currently being designed for the new SAT. Critical Reading questions are likewise modeled after the ones you will find on the new SAT—main ideas, supporting detail, and word-in-context.

Recommended for grades 9-10 ... Read more

Book Description

Provides everything children need to build multiple skills in language. Focusing on phonics, structural analysis and dictionary skills, this workbook also offers creative ideas for using phonics and word study skills in other language arts. Over 200 pages. Answer key included. ... Read more

Book Description

Would you like your next report card to be better than your last?This book can help you get better grades and set you on the road to straight A's.

This valuable guide is packed with tips, techniques, and helpful hints from the people who know best: A+ students and teachers.You'll also find charts, checklists, handy reference information, study guides, and all kinds of ways to make your homework, reports, and test results shine.You can get great grades and get more out of school -- discover the 101 tried-and-true ways to get straight A's. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Great Advice for Kids
I remember reading this book when I was in fourth grade. Although some of the suggestions may seem like common sense to adults, I'll admit that these tips helped me immensely as a young student. (I believe it was also a factor in my success in middle and high school, as I went on to become valedictorian of my high school.) This book would make a great gift for children in elementary school. I highly recommend it.

Helpful in some ways but some unnecessary tips
I think this book was good and well-researched, but some things were unrealistic. I felt that some of the tips encouraged dumping your straight B and below friends just to befriend the straight As peole. Tips like listening to classical music were kinda lame. If you listen to classical music, you should do it because you want to, not because you want to get straight A's. It was a well-researched book, but.. at many points unrealistic.

Great for someone who wants to do their best in school
I reccomend this book to anyone who wants to do their best in school, and wants to improve their study skills. It has many tips in it and talks about many different things, from eating the right foods, to supplies, to how to do different things, like outlines.

Do you want to improve you grades?
This book shows you some tried and true methods of doing better in school. It has been put together by lots of students that are just like you and me. It tells you about from using your mind efficantally to being organized. It has some of the best motivational tips there are and is a must for any student who wants to do better in school. You might not get strait A's with this book, however you defentally can do a whole lot better than what you are doing now! ... Read more

Book Description

Grades PreK–6From the Premier Educational Publisher PreK–12, Comprehensive Curriculum Plus Test Practice is an educational workbook series designed with children in mind! Comprehensive Curriculum Plus Test Practice prepares children by giving them a solid foundation in the basic skills necessary for success in today’s classrooms. A special test preparation section offers essential assessment tools. Building on the proven and trusted Comprehensive Curriculum of Basic Skills material, the workbook series includes activities and exercises focused on the essential skills children need: • Phonics, Spelling, and Vocabulary • Reading Comprehension • Math • Language Arts • Test Practice Features: • Perforated pages for easy removal• Colorful artwork• A complete answer key• Teaching suggestions for parents• PreK/K readiness benchmarks and skills checklist ... Read more