Determining the parts of speech of the answer choices can help you to determine if a secondary meaning is being used in the provided relationship. On the GRE analogy questions, the parts of speech of the provided relationship words are the same as the parts of speech of all the answer choices.
For example, consider the following analogy question:
| WELT: INJURY |
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tail : bird |
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finger : appendage |
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flower: garden |
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moon: earth |
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book: knowledge |
Welt can be defined in one of two ways; either as a verb or as a noun. As a noun, welt means a raised bump on the skin indicating a bruise from a slight injury, and as a verb, welt means to dry up and to become smaller. If you cannot determine the definition of welt as it is used in the above relationship, look at the answer choices, and you'll notice that all of the first words are nouns, and therefore, welt has to be used as a noun in the provided relationship. As soon as you make this observation, you can determine that welt is an example of an injury, in which case the answer to the analogy is the second choice, finger:appendage, because a finger is an example of an appendage.
Test Tip |
If you are unsure if a primary or secondary meaning of a word is being using in an analogy question, look at the answer choices for an easy clue. If all of the answer choices are of a noun:verb relationship, then the provided relationship is also of a noun:verb type. Likewise, if the provided relationship is of a noun:adjective type, then all of the answer choices are also of the type noun:adjective. You can use this trick to distinguish if primary or secondary meanings of a word are being used, because often-times the primary and secondary meanings for a word will be different parts of speech. |