Took USSR Rise and Fall today...

[highlanderburial]

I don't have a lot that isn't added to the specific exam section. What I did have to hit Wiki for was the artists, poets, and Nobel Prize winners. Esp the guy that wrote Dr. Zhivago. When it asked those questions, his name was easy to single out. They would then throw in the name of a non-artist (malenkov, bera(sp?) so your down to a 50/50. If you knew what artists were famous for what, (poetry, theater) you could usually get the correct one.
Know who Bera was (Secret police). Know a little about Tito.
The timeline of leaders was pretty important. I wrote down all the leaders from the czars (Peter and Katherine) all the way to Yeltzin. I then wrote down the events that happened in their tenure. If you go through IC, and hit the highpoints of each leader you will get the gist of what the question is.

I can't stress enough to learn who the kronies of each leader were. Guys like Bera,Molotov, Markhov. They only come up a few times in the IC questions but it's crucial on more than 9 or 10 questions to know who belonged in who's regime. This test kind of sucker punched you a few times, it would give you a string of 2 or 3 relatively easy ones and then slammed by like 4 or 5 total knoggin crackers!

They asked more than five or six questions in the roman numeral format that drove me nuts. Example: What Cities were razed by the Nazis in WWII:
I Stalingrad
II Moscow
III Sverdlosk
IV Riga

Answers
a) I and II
b) I and IV
c) I, II, IV
d) I,II,III,IV

That kind of question! I hate them! The only saving grace is that a name or event was thrown in as a zinger, or an obviously wrong answer. You then spent the next few minutes trying to hash out if the other 3 definitely were or weren't! (This was not a question, it was just an example I whipped off for demo purposes.)

Take it section by section and definitely use the Dantes study guide. It gives you a great flavor of the questions they are going to ask.

I hope this helped.
-HB