Customer Reviews

Number Properties GMAT Preparation Guide (Manhattan GMAT Preparation Guides)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I scored 750 (49, 42) on the GMAT and from experience, high GMAT score is not about tricks or solving thousands of questions - it is about having a strong foundation. Arithmetic is critical for the GMAT - close to 50% of quant questions you encounter will rely on arithmetic to solve. If you are rusty with math (primes, powers, roots, etc), this is one of the best books to refresh the basics of Arithmetic without spending months on it. Besides review, it also lists ways to save time on calculations. The faster you can do easier questions, the more time you have for the hard ones, and those are the ones that count on the GMAT.

Pros:
- This book comes with a code that provides access to 6 Manhattan GMAT tests for free ($45 value; online access)
- The book is split into 2 sections - basic and advanced, which is a better approach than dumping everything at the same time. By covering 2 separate sections for basic and then in the second half of the book advanced section, it makes you review the basics again and burns them in the memory.
- Strong section on divisibility rules (how to quickly tell if a number is divisible by 3, 4, 6, 7, etc). This will save time on the test.
- Coverage of multiples
- Primes, factoring, odd, even, positive, negative
- Powers, roots, consecutive numbers, remainders
- Bonus Question bank (online access)

Cons/Areas of Improvement
- No systematic coverage of numbers between 1 and 0 and 0 and -1, and these are some of the trickiest ones
- No strong coverage of absolute values - few of us remember how to do these
- Has exercises but relies on the Official Guide for practice GMAT questions


Bottom Line: Absolutely get this book in addition to anything else you are using. It is worth the time and money. This is one of the most popular GMAT books among the GMAT Club community and is always in the top 5 of the "Top 20 Best GMAT Books" list.

Good Luck on the GMAT.
BB - Founder of GMAT Club Community.

"Very good for the target audience" - I think this sums it all. If you are someone who has not done active maths for some time now, and therefore does not remember the concepts involved very well, this is the book for you. This I will say holds true for most of the books of the Manhattan Quant series.
The Manhattan Quant series books cover the concepts only to the degree that gets asked in the GMAT, and do not overwhelm you.
Plus, as each of the Manhattan books then turns to the Official Guide for practice, each of the books has a section where the appropriate questions for that topic are numbered from the OG. They also detail the toughest of the lot from OG. Here I think the book is useful for anyone, irrespective of the personal comfort level with maths.
Therefore if you are true to yourself and practice the questions marked from OG as you go along, this would prove to an excellent resource for cracking the quant part of the GMAT.

The Manhattan GMAT quantitative guides are great for reviewing or just flat out learning the quant concepts tested on the GMAT. Don't let the thinness of the books fool you; they efficiently pack in alot of material and do not pad the books with lots of practice questions created by them. It's far better to work off of Official Guide questions, and each Manhattan GMAT guide has a handy list of all OG questions subdivided into Problem Solving & Data Sufficiency, and further subdivided according to the concept tested. There is an additional problem set of the most challenging OG questions spanning all concepts. I am decent, but rusty at math, and after using a couple of the Manhattan GMAT quant guides, was able to improve my quant score from high 40s on practice tests to 51 on the real thing! I can't recommend these books enough.

The Manhattan series was the most helpful for me on my GMAT because other GMAT prep books only shows time saving or test taking tips but does not go into details about the various topics which I needed because I don't have a strong quantitative base. In fact, I didn't know even the basic idea of number properties or even odd plus odd is even (must have been asleep in math class) and so these guides were a must for me. Except for the critical reasoning guide, I give them all five stars +++!

Too bad I found these guides too late (just 2 weeks before the exam) and by the time they arrived in the mail, I didn't have time to do any of the practice exercises but I still managed to improve my score from 500 to 640 from just skimming through these guides. 640 may not be a high score, but for someone who didn't know what a cube root is two weeks before the exam, these guides sure did a good job getting me up to speed. In my situation, these guides were heaven sent.

If you're really good with math then they might be too easy and too basic for you. Even then, they would still serve as a nice 'refresher'. They are short and concise and it only took me about an hour or less to skim through each and so they are pricey if you're just using them for a quick review. But if you don't know math like I don't know math, BUY THEM ALL!!! THEY ROCK!

GMAT has been getting more difficult over the years. If you have any doubt, take the GMAT Prep (just google it) and compare the level of difficulty with the Offical Guides. The difference is very substantial.

Unfortunately, most GMAT prep companies, includng MGMAT, have been behind he curve of the changes.

But you are in luck as this new MGMAT book succeeds where other books, includng the previous edition of MGMAT number properties book, have failed. This new edition provides a very comprehensive explanation of GMAT number properties (primes, odd and evens, postive and negative, consecutive intgers, exponents, roots etc) which the previous version was lacking. Most importantly, this book is far better at emulating the difficulty and types of questions of the current GMAT test.

Number properties is perhaps one of the most difficult components of GMAT Quant section. Although GMAT tests only high school math, do not mistake its quant section for an SAT. For example, how many prime factors (odd or even) does a perfect square of an integer have? Can you find the total number of factors (not just prime factors) of number 2000 in under 2 minutes? Even if you are good in math, you probably can't without the help of this book. And yes, GMAT does ask you such questions which you should answer in 2 minutes or less.

I didn't take a class, but I have alot of friends who have and have used the Kaplan book and practice tests in addition to the Manhattan. Manhattan prep material and tests are head and shoulders above Kaplan. My only wish is that I had started with the Manhattan series and not even worried about Kaplan. Kaplan may have the brand name, but the fact that Manhattan focuses only on the GMAT shines through. The material goes wayyy more in depth, and it really leverages the other best source of practice material you have, the Official Guide (it has a great feature called rephrasing that references the OG problems directly to give data sufficiency help. It almost makes so much sense that it seems obvious but ingenious at the same time. Why not use the actual old test problems provided by the GMAC as much as you can?).

I wasn't going to buy the whole series but was so impressed by the first book I used (Sentence Correction), that I bought a couple of the quantitative prep books. I was so impressed by those, that I ended up buying all the rest of them. I can not stress enough how much more focused and useful this material is than Kaplan. When used in conjunction with the Official Guide, you have everything you need to break 700.

The things these books provide make so much sense as the best way to prepare, that it makes you wonder why everyone else doesn't do it. My guess is that Manhattan benefits from a focused business model of limiting itself to the GMAT. If you're not looking to score that well and only need to practice some and get used to the questions, the Official Guide is enough. But the Manhattan series is also nice in that it allows you to pick and choose the certain topics you need extra help with. Also, by only buying one book, you get access to six practice tests that are very difficult and provide invaluable information in its readouts of your performance (much more detailed and useful than Kaplan's. Hate to keep hating on Kaplan, but it's the only thing I have to compare to. It's not horrible really, it just pales in comparison to Manhattan. I think of the Kaplan material like I think of McDonald's, very well-known but pretty junky. It'll fill you up, but you won't feel great afterward...)

I've never taken the time to review any items on Amazon.com before, but I have been so impressed with this product that I felt compelled to let others know about it.

Don't waste your money on a class, get the Manhattan series instead. You'll save over a thousand dollars and be better prepared as well!

Good luck!

I self studied and scored a 770 on the GMAT. Here are my thoughts on the Manhattan GMAT Number Properties Strategy guide:

===== OVERVIEW =====

The Manhattan GMAT Number Properties guide is the first in the series of five MGMAT guides devoted specifically to the quantitative part of the GMAT. This book in particular deals with divisibility, the properties of positive and negative numbers, powers of real numbers and the order of operations. The authors of the book do a great job in covering these topics, building up from the basics to the harder topics.

The book is structured in two parts, a basic-intermediate part and an advanced one (which you are advised to attempt only if you've already clearly understood the first). Besides the theoretical review, the first part features 100 "in action" problems (mostly similar to Problem Solving questions, but some with no answer choices), while the advanced section contains 66 of these problems.

===== PROS =====

*Extensive theoretical review of number properties, possibly the most exhaustive that I've read so far. The authors also put these concepts to work in various problems that are explained in great detail (I've seen one question explained in more than two pages!)

*Provides access to 6 online computer adaptive tests, considered to be among the best in the industry in terms of accuracy of the scores. The code you use to register online also allows you to practice using an extra 25 questions on the topic

*Each of the two sections (basic-intermediate and advanced) has a handy list of problems from the The Official Guide for GMAT Review, 12th Edition that test the concepts discussed so that you may practice in a targeted manner

*Features quite a few challenging problems - even some that are explained in the theoretical part of the book caught me off-guard! As such, I think the book is a great resource for some advanced practice

===== CONS =====

*This is probably one of the most "intimidating" books in the whole series of 8 MGMAT guides. The book earns points for its comprehensiveness, but at times it seems that they supply rules and tips that are only rarely tested on the GMAT. If you already have a firm grasp of the basics and you're just buying the guide as a refresher or advanced resource, then you've probably stumbled upon a gold mine. However, if you're an English major who's been out of school for 6-7 years, then I think you might want to schedule around two-three weeks to go from cover to cover!

*While Data Sufficiency does get its own chapter and there are quite a few examples of Data Sufficiency in the book, I believe they could have done an even better job on the topic. The book seems to focus too much on rephrasing DS questions, which is not a bad idea at all; however, it seems to have missed a few details about this question type (i.e. never confuse a "No" answer with insufficient information). More practice questions would have also been a plus

===== BOTTOM LINE =====

An impressive collection of both theory and practice, the Manhattan GMAT Number Properties guide gets five stars for its completeness of the subject coverage. However, test takers be warned: this is no easy book, so be sure to pick it up well in advance of your test day!

About me: Dana Jinaru, 770 GMAT scorer, expert at Beat The GMAT - a community serving 1.5 million+ MBA applicants each year

What I especially like about this GMAT prepbook is that it explained Number Properties in a non-complicated way and I learned properties that I had never learned when I took Algebra or other math courses in college that is essential for the GMAT. For example, the rules of counting and summing large consecutive numbers and multiples. If you don't know these rules and the rules for finding multiples and factoring quickly you won't be able to perform well on the exam.
***Please excuse my grammatical errors***

This stuff isn't taught at high school or college. I learned soooo much from this book, it's just amazing.

CON: Not free. I didn't buy it before taking my 1st test. (Scored 480 and studying for 2nd test)

I studied alone for the GMAT and used the manhattan GMAT reviews and the Official GMAT review books to prepare for my exam. This one out of the series is by far the best. It gives you the tricks you need to attack certain problems that keep coming up on both sections of the math. I also liked the six free of charge online exams that are included with the book. For this price you cannot beat that!