Free Verbal Analogies Test

What a verbal analogies test actually measures

An analogy asks you to do something narrower and harder than it first appears. You are not asked whether you know four words; you are asked whether you can name the relationship binding the first two, hold that relationship steady while your attention moves to a new subject, and then recognise the one option that reproduces it. Psychologists call this relational reasoning, and it is one of the better single predictors of general reasoning ability because it cannot be faked by memorisation. You can learn a thousand definitions and still fail an analogy, because the definitions are not the question. The question is the shape of the link.

The five relation families used here

Twenty items are split evenly across five families, four items each. Part to whole pairs a component with the thing it belongs to — a movement with a symphony, a scene with a play. The trap is direction: if the first pair runs part first and whole second, an option offering a smaller part instead of the containing whole is wrong even though it is clearly related. Function pairs a tool with what it does or what it acts on; here the trap is a word from the same workshop that names a material rather than an action. Degree pairs a mild term with an intense one — drizzle with downpour, annoyed with furious — and the usual distractor is a synonym of the mild term rather than an intensification of it. Opposites look easy until a near-synonym of the wrong half is offered. Category pairs a member with the class it belongs to, and the distractor is usually a sibling member or an associated object rather than the class itself.

Splitting the test evenly across the five families is deliberate. Most people are noticeably better at one or two of them, and a test built entirely from opposites would flatter some readers and punish others without telling either group much. Spreading the load means your total reflects general relational skill rather than a single habit of mind.

A method that works on hard items

The single most useful technique is to build a sentence before you read the options. Given anchor is to hold, do not think "boat things". Say: "an anchor is the object whose purpose is to hold a vessel in place". Now carry that sentence to the second pair: "a rudder is the object whose purpose is to ___ a vessel". Only one option survives, and the words that merely smell nautical fall away immediately. When two options still survive, your sentence was too loose — tighten it and run the test again. Vagueness, not ignorance, is what costs people points on analogy tests.

The second technique is to check direction explicitly. Analogies are ordered pairs, and roughly one wrong answer in five comes from applying a correct relation backwards. If the stem moves from small to large, your answer must be larger than the third word, not smaller. Reading the stem as a sentence rather than as two nouns makes this mistake almost impossible.

How your score is calculated

Each correct answer counts one point, nothing is deducted for a wrong one, and the raw total out of twenty is mapped onto the familiar scale where 100 is average and fifteen points is one standard deviation. Twenty items is enough for a stable band but not for a precise value, so read the number as the middle of a range about ten points wide.

Getting a result you can trust

• Take it once while rested. A second attempt measures memory of the items, not reasoning.
• Answer everything. A blank is always worth less than a considered guess.
• Give an item thirty seconds, then guess and move on. The Back button lets you return.
• Do not look words up. A dictionary turns a reasoning test into a search-speed test.
• If English is your second language, expect a few points of drag and consider the visual culture fair test for a language-free comparison.

How this differs from other verbal tests

A vocabulary test asks what a word means. A verbal reasoning test hands you a passage and asks whether a statement is true, false, or unsupported by it. An analogies test sits between them: it needs enough vocabulary to know the words, but it spends all of its difficulty on structure. That is why analogy scores correlate more strongly with matrix and pattern tests than vocabulary scores do — the underlying operation, mapping a rule from one instance to another, is the same whether the instances are words or shapes. If you score well here and poorly on a matrix test, the likely difference is visual working memory rather than reasoning; if the gap runs the other way, the language layer is probably the bottleneck.

Analogies also live well outside a test page. Graduate admissions tests used analogies for decades, and many graduate employers still include them in verbal aptitude batteries, because the format is quick to score and hard to coach. But the reason to practise them is not the exam. Reasoning by analogy is how people actually handle unfamiliar problems: you meet something new, you recognise its shape from something known, and you carry the structure across. Done carelessly it produces confident nonsense, which is why the discipline of stating the relation precisely and then checking whether it really holds is worth more than the score at the end of this page.