Customer Reviews

IQ Booster: Improve Your Iq Performance Dramatically

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First, the bad stuff; most of the book is practise test material, the author having decided to prove his contention that you can raise your IQ dramatically by reading his book and applying the lessons. There's very, very little here in terms of practical methods and techniques which you can apply; and most of it is pretty common sense stuff, like "there isn't much you can do with this particular type of question, other then try various approaches until one works".

On the positive side: the book is relatively inexpensive, it does contain SOME worthwhile information - certainly enough to justify its modest purchase price - and it does provide a good quantity of current IQ test questions. And therein lies its true value.

I firmly believe that the best way to do well on any kind of test is to become familiar with the material; and with IQ tests, the way to learn to do better is to do IQ tests. There are certainly enough of them out there, and doing the tests will do two things for you: first, you'll become better at solving problems, as your brain becomes more agile; and secondly, you'll start to recognise identical (and very similar) questions. You can only be tripped up by a trick question once, and there just aren't that many unique trick questions out there.

When the author revises his book, I'd invite him to quadruple the size of the test tips section. For example, he does include a very interesting collection of words that can be tacked onto the front or back of another word to make a new word - for example, SUN can be tacked onto SHINE to arrive at SUNSHINE. This is useful in solving the "what word can be added to the front of each of the following words, to arrive at new words" sort of question. I'd like to see a much larger list. I'd also like to see a relatively recent stanford/binet IQ test, rather then the authors nicely done, but unofficial, test. And standard questions from commonly used IQ tests - even a list of 500 or so questions - would be very helpful.

The bottom line is, you can raise your IQ dramatically by practising on a lot of IQ tests ahead of time. By bringing this point to the fore, the author has given test takers a valuable edge. The author could increase the size of the edge by increasing the number of tips, and by including more - and more commonly used - test questions.

One good thing about the book: it doesn't take long to get through it. Out of 125 pages, only 25 contain helpful content. The rest consists of 2 practice tests and answers. There all also very generous margins and wide spacing. Overall, there just isn't a lot of book here. During those 25 pages, the author explains the solutions to the "before" test, which does make it likely that you'll do better on the "after" test. I was hoping for generalized rules and strategies that would show one how to attack the sort of problems that crop up in an IQ test. There were some, but not as many as I had hoped. Also, I don't know how representative these questions were. Overall, I found the book somewhat helpful, but disappointing.

Q: 2 is to 4 as 4 is to ? (16, 30, 8, 12)
A: "Clearly the answer is 8."

The above is taken as an excerpt from the book. But isn't 2 the squareroot of 4? And therefore with 4 being the squareroot of 16, isn't 2 is to 4 as 4 is to 16? Clearly the answer is not "Clearly 8". I am searching for a book filled with true logic challenges, not frustrating assumption and ignorance. Can somebody please recommend?

Ok, I gave the book 3 stars because it contained ok iq tests, but I have two problems with the book.

1. Some of the answers to the questions were just plain illogical, and sometimes if an answer was deduced that logically fit, it was not also in the back. THe logic used to discover some of the patterns was just stupid in some cases, as it wasnt something that relied on intellilect, more something that relied on being used to iq tests.

2. The fact that the author says he is raising your iq is a little bit inaccurate. I just briefly read over the section about how to answer the questions (after doing both tests), and it seemed like he pretty much told you how to answer a lot of the questions on the "after test"...including some of the illogical ones might I add.

I scored a 143 on the first test, and a 135 or so on the second one... I didnt read the advice given, and that is probably why the second score is lower..i'm not blaming the book by any means. Anyway, if anyone out there got a score of 150+ WITHOUT reading any of what he said for the after test, email me, i'd like to hear actually.

This was helpful in that it describes some of the strategies used by test preparers to invent questions. For instance, in the 'how are these words alike' type questions, I always thought about MEANINGS of words, like the SAT-type thinker I am. But there are other ways the word problems are designed - for instance, simply by the length of the word, or the position of the vowels. Those sorts of analogies never even occurred to me to think about. Worth its reasonable price.

This book thinks that I have an I.Q. of a 120 and that I may improve it to a level of 132. I probably better not believe what the book thinks because I usually fall flat on my face in an embarrassing place when I believe something or someone who tells me something like that.

Well, well, let me see, hmm. It was a good book in that it increased my IQ by about 15 points. And I advice anybody that is about to take an IQ test in school, to read this book before taking. As the person who commented above, lots of space are not used, and much of the book were tests, rather than techniques taught. I also have another problem with this book. The author emphasizes how unbiased he liked his tests to be. But it seemed as though his vocab section was kinda culture-bias. Most of my errors were in the vocab section, and this resulted in the decreasing of my IQ score by about a 15 pt difference from my IQ results in school. Thus, in total, the book didn't increase my IQ. However, it was fun while doing it! Anybody who's anybody should read this book.