GRE Analogies
The directions for the Analogy questions on the GRE are simple:
| In the following questions, a related pair of words or phrases is followed by five pairs of words or short phrases. Select the pair that best expresses a relationship between the words in capital letters. |
Seems straight-forward, right? Well, not really. The hard part about analogies is that you not only have to know your word definitions, but you also need to know secondary meanings AND you must be able to relate words to one another.
An example analogy question:
Assuming you know the definition of the words in capital letters and all of the definitions of the word choices, then the analogy question will be straight-forward, as the makers of the GRE claim that the provided relationships are precise between all words given. The above example is straight-forward, (the answer is finger : hand, because a finger is always attached to a hand just like a nose is always attached to a face), but be assured that the analogy questions you'll see will be more challenging, especially if your running score on the verbal section is high.
So yes, analogies are easy ONLY if you know the definition of all the words. Most people are not walking dictionaries, and so there are several tactics that you can employ to find the right answer. The following tactics are covered in this section, to help prepare you for the GRE analogy questions:
- Making a Sentence
- Using Precise Relationships
- Considering Parts of Speech
- Educated Elimination
- Left to Right and Right to Left
- Using Secondary Meanings
- Common Types of Analogies