Analogies Tutorial Analogy Types To begin with, it helps to understand the various types of analogies that are out there. If you can grasp the basic patterns, then it will make it easier for you to answer quickly and correctly. Don't spend an excessive amount of time memorizing all the different types shown below. Just familiarize yourself with them so that when you're taking the test, they'll come to your mind naturally and help inform your decisions. 1) Defining Attribute egg : shell herpetologist : reptiles herbivore : plants In this case, the second word is a defining attribute of the first. For instance, eggs have shells. A herpetologist is someone who studies reptiles. A herbivore is an animal that eats plants. 2) Class frog : amphibian hut : building ballad : song In this case, the first word is a member of a class defined by the second word. A frog is an amphibian. A hut is a type of building. A ballad is a type of song. 3) Definitions procure : buy stingy : ungenerous menu : list As you can see, the word on the right is the definition of the word on the left. To "procure" is to "buy." A "stingy" person is "ungenerous." A "menu" is a "list." The words are related by their definitions. 4) Group soldier : army fish : school singer : chorus In this case, the first word is a member of a group defined by the second word. A soldier is part of an army. A fish is a member of a school. A singer is part of a chorus. 5) Antonyms ugly : beautiful strong : weak silly : serious Words that are antonyms express opposing concepts. Ugly is the opposite of beautiful. Strong is the opposite of weak. Silly is the opposite of serious. 6) Pseudo Antonyms wicked : lovely happy : depressed headstrong : submissive These words aren't true antonyms, but there meanings are opposed. 7) Magnitude cheerful : ecstatic warm : scalding upset : irate Each of the above words means a similar thing but to a different degree. It's all about the intensity or magnitude of the meaning of each word. 8) Synonyms generous : giving nasty : mean chubby : plump These words mean the same thing. 9) Pseudo Synonyms grouchy : disagreeable hotheaded : incautious short : puny These words aren't synonyms but their meanings are close enough. 10) Part Of toe : foot tire : car key : typewriter The first words are all part of the second. A toe is part of a foot. A tire is part of a car. A key is part of a typewriter. 11) Function brain : think car : transport candle : illuminate The function of a brain is to think. The function of a car is to transport. The function of a candle is to illuminate. 12) Person and Creation journalist : article sculptor : sculpture painter : painting This is the relationship between a type of person and what they create. A journalist writes articles. A sculptor makes sculptures. A painter creates paintings. 13) Person and Tool poet : pen mason : trowel dentist : drill This is the relationship between a type of person and the tool that person uses. 14) Person and Action secretary : dictation golfer : swing runner : run This is the relationship between a type of person and an action that person performs. 15) Manner saunter : walk caress : touch snigger : laugh Saunter is a manner in which one walks. Caress is a type of touch. Snigger is a way of laughing. 16) Tools and Objects bat : baseball hammer : nail scissor : paper This is the relationship between a type of tool and object it acts upon. 17) Action and Meaning wave : greeting frown : disapprove kiss : affection Here we have an action and its corresponding meaning. 18) Person and Place banker : bank clerk : store priest : church This is the relationship between a type of person and a location that person occupies. 19) Other Analogies include: Age ... child : parent Cause and Effect ... flu : sickness Gender ... hen : rooster Sequence ... second : third Spatial ... stairs : hallway Symbol and Meaning ... cross : Christianity Tool and Action ... tweezers : pluck etc. We could go on and on, but this should give you a good starting point for analyzing and dissecting the various types of analogies. The more you understand the relationships, the better off you'll be when taking the exams. And merely understanding the types shown above will help you to know what to look for. Establish the Relationship When working on analogy questions, the first thing you should do is to establish the relationship between the capitalized words. This is critical. If you jump straight to the answers, it will only confuse matters. It's better to focus on the capitalized words and try to determine how they relate to each another. A good strategy is to make up a sentence using the two words. For example: ARMY : SOLDIERS :: (A) ocean : boats (B) plane : cockpits (C) frog : ponds (D) team : players (E) pig : feet You might create a sentence like, "The army is made up of soldiers." From this sentence, the relationship between army and soldiers becomes clear. Now look at the possible answers and test each one in the sentence. "The ocean is made up of boats" doesn't work. "The plane is made up of cockpits," doesn't work. "The frog is made up of ponds," doesn't work. "The team is made up of players," works, so (D) must be the correct answer. The reason (D) works is that the words are related by their dictionary definitions. The definition of army is: "A large number of people united for some specific purpose." And the definition of team is "A cooperative unit." Both of these imply groups of people united under a common goal. Don't let answer (A) trick you. The "ocean" relates to "boats," but it isn't made up of boats. The bottom line is that the correct answer must always have the same characteristics as the original pair. Narrow Your Approach Often times you'll find that more than one answer makes sense. If this is the case, you have to narrow down the meaning to get at the subtleties in the relationship between the words. The best way to accomplish this is to add more details that highlight the particular nature of each word. For example: LEGS : SPIDER :: (A) branches : tree (B) grass : garden (C) fins : fish (D) feet : human (E) tail : dog If you create a sentence like "A spider has legs," then every single answer seems to work. "A tree has branches," "A garden has grass," "A fish has fins," etc. This means that your sentence is not specific enough. Go back and try to come up with a new sentence. For instance, you can make up a sentence like: "A spider moves its legs." In this case (A) and (B) don't make sense, but (C), (D) and (E) still do. Let's try an even more detailed sentence, such as "A spider walks on its legs." When we do this, the answer becomes clear. Fish don't walk on their fins and dogs don't walk on their tails, so the answer must be (D). "A human walks on its feet." The key to making good sentences is to structure the sentence so that it brings out the underlying relationship between the words. In the above example, spiders use their legs to move around. This is the reason they have legs, and your sentence must highlight this fact if it is going to be useful. You should also be aware that when we created the sentence "A spider walks on its legs," we reversed the order of the words. "Spider" comes first and "legs" comes second. If we do this, we have to make sure that when we plug the possible answers into this sentence, we remember to reverse their order too. After all, it would make absolutely no sense to say "A feet walks on its human." Whether or not you choose to reverse the order of the words, you should make sure that your sentence encapsulates the exact meaning of the capitalized words. This is the most important thing you can do. Beware of Eye-Catchers The creators of standardized exams often try to trick you by putting in words that sound right but are wrong. For example: CRUMB : BREAD:: (A) ounce : unit (B) cream : butter (C) water : bucket (D) twine : rope (E) splinter : wood If you just glance at this, it seems like (B) is the best choice. After all, "bread and butter" jumps to mind. This is an eye-catcher, and it's usually designed to mislead you. When you take the time to analyze the relationship between the capitalized words, you can clearly see that "cream" and "butter" make no sense. For instance, your sentence may read, "A crumb is a small piece of bread." Now plug in the words in answer (B). "A cream is a small piece of butter." This is obviously wrong. However, if we try (E), "A splinter is a small piece of wood," we can see that it works. As a rule of thumb, don't just jump to the word that seems to work without properly testing it. And always be suspicious of words that grab your attention because they sound right. Often, if the capitalized words sound scientific in nature, the eye-catchers will also sound scientific. Or if the capitalized words are about sports, the eye-catcher will have something to do with sports, and so on. Almost invariably these are the wrong answers, but you won't know until you test them. Just be aware that is one of the most common traps in standardized exams. Reversed Relationships Another trick the creators of standardized exams use to get you is to reverse the original relationship within the answers. For example: NEMESIS : HARM :: (A) help : friend (B) apprentice : learning (C) prodigy : talent (D) muse : inspiration (E) sycophant : criticism It seems like (A) is the right answer because a "nemesis" is someone who "harms" you, while a "friend" is someone who "helps" you. The relationship is similar. But if you look closely, the order is reversed. To test it out, create a sentence like, "The nemesis wants to harm you." Now plug in answer (A), "The help wants to friend you." As you can see, it makes no sense because of the order of the words. A smart approach is to ask yourself who is doing what to whom? In this case, the "nemesis" is causing "harm" to someone. If you look at answer (C), a "prodigy" isn't doing anything to anyone. Instead a "prodigy" has "talent." In answer (B) an "apprentice" is "learning," i.e., an apprentice is not making someone else learn. The only answer that makes sense is (D), where a "muse" is inspiring someone else. Here relationship is the same as with the capitalized words. Grammatical Information Words can have multiple meanings, and only by paying close attention to the grammatical information can you determine which meaning is intended. The same parts of speech apply both to the capitalized words and to the answers. For example, if the answers are all noun and verb combinations, you can be sure the appropriate meaning for the capitalized words will follow the same "noun : verb" pattern. Now let's look at an example: HUSBAND : RESOURCES (A) rewrite : book (B) examine : statement (C) predict : weather (D) conserve : power (E) spend : income We normally think of a "husband" as a married man, but in this case, that meaning isn't the correct one. The word "husband" also has a meaning defined as "to use cautiously and frugally." In this case, you can determine the correct definition only by looking at the answers. When you study the answers, you can see that they are all "verb : noun" combinations, not "noun : noun." This is what we mean by looking at the grammatical information to determine the intended meaning. The relationship between the parts of speech in the answers must be consistent with that of the capitalized words. Once we pin down the parts of speech, we can see the relationship clearly: "husbanding" is an action that has a direct effect upon "resources," in much the same way that "conservation" has upon "power." In other words, "conservation" limits the use of "power," just like "husbanding" does to "resources." No other answers listed limit the use of the nouns listed on the right side of the column. This means (D) is the most obvious answer. This, however, would not have been obvious if you had assumed that "husband" meant a married man. In that case, none of the answers would have made any sense, and you would just have to take a wild guess. Secondary Meanings Don't rely on the primary meanings of words. Often it's their secondary meanings that make the most sense. For example: NIP: DEVELOP :: (A) mystify : understand (B) prepare : catastrophe (C) shuffle : list (D) work : stamina (E) give : reward The word "nip" could mean a number of things, such as to bite (like a dog nipping at someone's heel), or a small drink, or a tart spiciness, or even to stop something from happening (like to nip it in the bud). It's important for you to deduce the proper meaning of the word. If you create a sentence and it doesn't seem to make sense with any of the answers, then it's probably because you've chosen the wrong meaning for one or both of the capitalized words. Step back and think of secondary meanings and create sentences with those. If one of them works with a particular answer, you know it's the right one. In the above example, the relationship between "nip" and "develop" doesn't make sense with any of the answers unless the meaning of nip is to stop something from happing, as in "nip it in the bud." In this particular case, "nipping the development" is similar to "mystify the understanding." Both of them prevent something from happening, but you can only know this by testing out the secondary meanings until you come to something which appears to work. Eliminating Answers It's always smart to eliminate as many wrong answers as quickly as possible. When taking a standardized exam, this tactic can be very effective. Instead of looking for the right answer first, just get rid of the wrong answers. You may find that you have only one answer left, and even if you don't know what the words mean in that answer, you can be somewhat certain it is the correct one. A good strategy is to quickly eliminate any answers that don't express a particular relationship. By this we mean quickly looking for answers whose pairs aren't matched in a way that produces a clear relationship. DIRECT : FILM :: (A) sing : car (B) dance : stage (C) demolish : puppets (D) jump : chair (E) manage : company As you can see, the relationship between "direct" and "film" is very clear. A good sentence might be, "I want to direct a film." Now, if we quickly look over the answers, we can eliminate the ones that don't express any clear relationship, such as "sing" and "car." The relationship here is tenuous at best. Maybe you sing in your car on the way to work, but that's not really a solid relationship. The same is for "demolish" and "puppets," as well as "jump" and "chair." Yes, you can demolish puppets and jump over a chair, but these have little or no relationship to the capitalized words. By eliminating the obviously poor choices, you can quickly reduce your options to (B) and (E). You might "dance on a stage," but you'd never "dance a stage," so it becomes clear that (E) is the right answer. Context is Key It's easy to get stymied by unfamiliar or difficult words. If this happens to you, the best thing you can do is to think of the context in which you've heard the words used. Even if you don't know the meaning of the words, the context can give you clues. For example: CONTRARY : CONFORM :: (A) conspiratorial : plot (B) indebted : repay (C) heretical : expel (D) skeptical : believe (E) propagandistic : persuade First, you should think up a sentence for the capitalized words. For instance, "The contrary ones refused to conform." Now plug in the possible answers to this sentence. Do any of them make sense? If you know the meaning of every word, it's easy to see that the only one that makes sense is (D). But let's say you didn't know the meaning of the words "conspiratorial" and "skeptical." The best thing you can do is to try and think of sentence in which you've heard these words used. For example, you may have heard of "conspiracy theories." So conspiratorial must relate to a conspiracy. If you plug this into our original sentence, "The conspiracy refused to plot," you can see it doesn't really make sense. Now let's try "skeptical." You may remember hearing something about "skeptics not believing in ghosts." If we plug this into our sentence, "The skeptics refused to believe," it seems to make sense. So that must be our answer. The End of the Set You'll find that the harder analogies always occur near the end of the set, so be prepared to take more time as you near the completion of the analogy section. With this in mind, it's important not to eliminate too many answers too quickly, especially when approaching the final analogy questions. This is because a significant relationship, although not obvious, may exist. Be sure to think of secondary meanings before you count them out. Also, if you find that nothing is working, you may want to go back and revisit any answers that you eliminated early on. There's a good chance you missed something.