Cook Your Way Through the S.A.T

Gr 9 Up—High school student Freiman-Mendel has come up with a game plan to learn vocabulary words in preparation for taking the Standard Aptitude Test required by most colleges today. She took something she loves—cooking—and combined it with something she doesn't love—standardized testing—and created this book. She chose 10 words each applied to 100 recipes to come up with a unique test-prep book of 1000 vocabulary words that frequently appear on entrance exams. Her mother, who homeschooled her through eighth grade (the teen now attends private school), stays discreetly in the background. Each recipe—lunch and snack foods, mostly vegetarian, and lots of desserts—comes with a paragraph using 10 words in context. They could be the history of tofu, or a rave about mocha cream frosting. A matching test accompanies each passage. The paragraphs, dependent as they are on the S.A.T. vocabulary list, aren't eloquent, but their brevity lends itself to memorization and review. This volume is one motivated student's disarming personal project that suggests possibilities in the dry genre of test prep. Learning Car Mechanics with the S.A.T.s? Garden Your Way Through the S.A.T.s? With enough passion and initiative, teens could almost write their own version.—Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY