Customer Reviews

Reader's Digest Word Power Quiz Book: 1,000 Word Challenges from America's Most Popular Magazine (50th Anniversary Celebration)

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People are often judged by the size of the vocabulary that they can use with effectiveness. If you use the right word you can impress, but the wrong word and you look like a dunce. Developing a powerful vocabulary takes basic practice, either by reading challenging books or working through exercises. This book contains some very "simple" exercises in vocabulary building and they were taken from the pages of Reader's Digest. If you have ever tried one of the "Word Power" exercises from an issue, you know how challenging they can be.
The advantage here is that you can go from exercise to exercise, improving your mind and the quality of the words that come out of your mouth or your pen. I enjoyed myself immensely as I learned many new words as I worked through the exercises.

You might be wondering, "Who is the intended audience of this quiz book?," or "Is the 'Word Power' book right for me?" If you are a well-read person, or say, someone who did reasonably well in high school, I believe you'll find the selected words of this book a bit too easy. In my case, what it did reveal were some words I thought I knew, but really did not, or only had an hazy understanding of - e.g., "concave" and "litany," words I was sure of, but gave me a surprise when I saw the answers. So I think this book is more suited to someone just starting high school or to Junior High kids - a great gift for a young person, hours of fun on a rainy day. Some criticisms, but none major. The 'Word Power' quizzes (50 total) are not numbered, nor are the words (20 ea) numbered within. If you are writing your answers on paper this is a handicap. There are lots of cutesy illustrations and dubious quotations in the margins that are purely extraneous. They're ok, I guess. Space wasted though, which might have been devoted to more quizzes. What would really be cool would be if Reader's Digest republished ALL of their 'Word Power' quizzes back to Jan. 1945. That's more than 16,000 words and 16 times what we see here. I'd buy that in a flash. Finally and commendably, for anyone who cares, this book was edited to be gender neutral, (i.e. there's an noticable attempt to place a positive emphasis on women).

This book was a gift for my father. He always loved to do the vocabulary quiz in the Readers Digest. So I knew this would be a great book to build his vocabulary. It arrived in new condition as stated and came really quickly. Thank you