The Analogies Section of the GRE

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The analogies section of the GRE tests your ability to understand different relationships between words.

You are presented with a pair of words and are asked to select another pair from a list of alternative answers. The words of the pair that you select must have the same relationship to each other as the words in the question. Be careful you do actually choose words that are related to each other in a certain way, not words that are related to the words in the question. For example if 'nurse:hospital' was the pair in the question, the relationship would be that a nurse works in a hospital. A correct answer word pair could be 'teacher:school' .

There are the various different relationships that you are expected to recognize. One of the most straightforward situations is where the 2 words are synonyms (words with the same or very similar meaning), and antonyms, (words that have opposite meaning).

Another one you may come across, is where 2 words have similar meaning, but one of them is stronger, denoting a greater degree or amount of the quality the words describe, for example: 'unhappy:miserable' , 'angry:furious' In another case the two words aren’t synonymous, but one is very much related to the other. One type of pair is one in which one word denotes a lack or deficiency in the other word. You may find a question where one of the words is a particular type of another such as 'cat:animal' Sometimes, it is a broad analogy, and you just have to find another word pair of which one is a type of the other. Another common analogy is where one word means something that is part of the other word. For example 'cell:organism' . In other cases, there may be more than one answer pair that has this relationship. In this case the relationship you are being asked to identify is more specific. For example the word pair could be: 'spectrum:color' and two of the alternative answers could be 'scale:tone' and 'wall:building' . A color is part of the spectrum, and a wall is part of a building. The correct answer is 'scale:tone' because a scale, in the musical sense, is a series of tones, and a spectrum is a series of colors.