Examkrackers MCAT 101 Passages: Cars: Critical Analysis & Reasoning Skills

I've taken the MCAT twice and bought the Examkrackers 101 passages for all but psych. I found this book very helpful. With that being said I had a pretty good foundation but needed more practice. I found the passages were similar to the exam. Personally, I struggled with the difficult passages on stuff I've never seen before so I found this useful as I could go through and do the more difficult passages. Reasoning wasn't spot on but pretty good. I feel it's a good buy.

Like other reviews (and already taking the MCAT once) I agree these passages are much harder than what is on the real exam, but if CARs is a weakness of yours and you still have a couple of weeks before the exam, buy this book. BUT if you take the test in like 2 weeks, this book will just scare you and you don't need to crush your confidence before.However, I still have 2 months before my exam date and I had the book for 2 weeks, this is what I have noticed. This book has changed the way I approached the passages, and has improved my timing, mainly because of the tips in this book. I realized I was reading the passage way too fast and was not getting the main idea, and when it came to the answers I spent way too much time going back to the passage because I barely read it the first time. Now, I read slowly and thoroughly, and when it comes to the questions I fly through them, hense my timing is better now even though I spend more time on reading. My score has almost doubled already, and I feel so confident because I know the questions on the real exam are not going to as vague.So overall, I absolutely recommend this book for those who have plenty of time before the exam and CARs is a weakness. If it is not your weakness, just stick to the AAMC resources, they are the most reliable study tool.

Buy this if you are looking for lots of practice and already have a solid CARS base. One of the claims of this book is that they ask a higher proportion of difficult questions than the real MCAT, which can get you into some trouble if this is the first CARS practice you do. Because they strive to make it hard, there seemed to be a lot of ambiguity in their answers. I felt as though each passage had one answer that required too many logical hoops to jump through and that about one question per each exam is just flat out wrong, so you have to have experience with AAMC CARS to know when you can ignore a certain question. Despite this, the passages themselves are actually really great.

Here's the thing, the biggest mistake you can make is to START practicing for CARS using this book. Use easier passages first and build your way up to this and use it like 6 weeks before the test. Good luck

I've never seen CARS covered this way before. I highly recommend the 101 Passages books to anyone taking the MCAT. They're inexpensive and great at teaching you how the passages will be framed.

I bought this book to start my CARS practice which unfortunately was a huge mistake.This book seems designed and intended to be purposefully very hard so that test takers will feel more comfortable in the real test, but by doing so, it misses the whole point of the CARS section.The questions are ridiculously difficult and rely on outrageous inferences to the point where this book does not at all do its purpose. There are even questions which have NO correct answer which is so exasperating, and the relevant explanation to such questions is something of the following sort: "Choice A is wrong because this and that, Choice B is not quite correct but not so wrong, Choice D is wrong because it is out of scope, Choice D doesn't seem to be the correct answer, but since it's not as wrong as Choice B, the answer is Choice D." This is completely unacceptable. This book will not help you prepare since it will direct your thinking and reasoning to a wrong way entirely out of the scope that the real MCAT requires of you. As a result, if you decided to launch your CARS practice using this book, you will have to re-adjust your thinking when you use AAMC material, and so you would have wasted precious time solving EK passages. The real MCAT CARS passages are less difficult, and the questions are tremendously more manageable as they are more related to the passage and authors' logical argumentations. Moreover, there are types of questions that are found in very low frequency, if ever, in this book, but the same types of such questions are more frequently asked in the real MCAT and in AAMC question packs. This means that this book does not properly expose potential test takers for the different types of questions for the CARS section.I highly recommend not buying this book nor using it as a supplement to other resources at all, and definitely do not use this book as a resource to start your CARS practice.

Great practice passages! Completing multiple passages under timed conditions I have found helps me improve my performance greatly.

Incredible explanations for each of the answers; moderate to high difficulty enhances your skills significantly

While I do like the general stategy that EK provides for tackling CARS (focus on the main idea, avoid referring to the original passage as much as possible), I can't recommend this question package. Half the questions have a 50/50 answer where the correct answer seems to be chosen based on a subjective criteria. The solutions provided are paragraphs long and sometimes require some logical hoop jumping to justify. The difficulty is also wildy inconsistent, one practice set I got high 70% and then the next set I got 49%. I don't have any reason to believe I degraded my ability 20% within two weeks, but it just seems too inconsistent for me. I know these passages are supposed to be difficult, but the question stems and answer choices just don't seem reasonable when compared to other CARS sources.

It's nice that there are so many passages (I was anxious about running out of practice material) but the quality of the material is not ideal. The questions are not representative of what you will likely encounter on the actual MCAT (I took the MCAT last summer, I am preparing for round two). My problem with this book is just their answer options. The passages and question stems are pretty representative, but the answers and the explanations provided in their solutions are not. The AAMC will not ask you to speculate the way that these questions/answers do. The Princeton Review and Kaplan offer superior practice material. If you purchase this book for CARS practice, use it for timing, and passage mapping, but don't freak out if your score is much, much, lower than it typically has been with other practice materials, and don't sweat it if the solutions seem far fetched to you. It's not you! It's the material.

Personally, the passages were a little tricky, but practice is practice, and the more practice you do, the better you'll get, so you might as well get the book.

Great passages

Perfect condition.