Yesterday evening, I was at Times the Bookshop in Centrepoint looking for GRE prep books. I went to the Education section and found plenty of books on SATs, GMATs and even TOEFLs. But I couldn’t find a single book on the GRE.
So I went to the counter where special offers are usually displayed, and saw that the Arco series of SATS, GMATS etc were on sale. GRE books too. But having done some research on the excellent Amazon website, I knew that the top-rated book was actually published by the Princeton Review (4.5 stars). So I went to the computer terminal near the cashier’s to do a search – on their pretty little intranet.
I typed in, ‘GRE’, but all I got were books beginning with titles like “Great Ways to Cook …”. I thought, this is silly. If I were looking for a book beginning with the word ‘Great’, I’d type in ‘Great’ and not ‘GRE’. It was behaving like a 1980’s library catalogue!
I decided to give it another try. “GRE CAT” brought up four results. One of the books was published by the Princeton Review, although it wasn’t the title I was looking for. I also saw it was dated 2001. Big help that would be. I asked the cashier where the other books were, and she said the Arco book was all they had in this store. Their records were obviously out of date.
That certainly defeated the purpose of having fancy search terminals in a spanking new bookshop – at least where my objectives were concerned. I decided to pick up the Arco book instead, since it was the 2003 edition, and included the latest syllabus changes (on Analytical Writing) in their questions.