Analogy Questions on IQ Tests: The One Rule That Solves Them

Analogy questions look like vocabulary tests and are not. They appear in verbal reasoning sections, in figural form in matrix tests, and in the numerical items of most aptitude batteries, and they all run on one structure. Once that structure is explicit, the questions get noticeably easier — and, more usefully, the wrong answers stop looking attractive.

The structure

An analogy is written A : B :: C : D and read "A is to B as C is to D". What is being tested is whether you can extract the relation holding between A and B and apply that same relation to C. The content of the words is scaffolding. The relation is the item.

This is why an analogy is a reasoning item rather than a knowledge item, provided the words are ones the test-taker knows. Two people with the same vocabulary can perform very differently, because the difficulty lies in isolating a relation and holding it steady while testing it against alternatives — a load on working memory as much as on verbal knowledge, and our piece on why those two are not the same thing covers where that distinction bites.

The rule: say the relation in a sentence first

Before reading the options, build a sentence linking A and B that is specific enough to exclude near misses. Then substitute C into the same sentence and see which option completes it. The discipline is in the specificity:

• Too vague: "a chapter has to do with a book". Almost anything survives that.
• Specific: "a chapter is one of the ordered parts a book is divided into". Now only one kind of answer fits.
• Direction matters. "A is a part of B" and "B is a part of A" are different relations, and pairs are frequently offered in reversed order to catch exactly that.
• Degree matters. "Warm and hot" is the same relation as "damp and soaked" only if the sentence records that the second term is an intensified version of the first.

The sentence is doing real work: it converts a vague feeling of relatedness into a testable claim. If you cannot write the sentence, you have not identified the relation, and picking the option that feels closest is how the distractors earn their keep.

How the wrong answers are built

Distractors on a well-constructed analogy item are not random. They are engineered around the two ways the sentence test fails, and recognising the type is often faster than solving the item directly:

• The associate. A word strongly connected to C but not by the target relation. If the pair is "chapter is to book", an option about libraries or reading is an associate of the topic, not an answer.
• The right relation, wrong direction. The relation holds but the terms are reversed. This catches anyone who identified the relation without noting its order.
• The right relation, wrong degree. Same type of link, wrong intensity — a synonym pair offered where the stem was an intensification.
• The near-category. A word from the same semantic field as the correct answer, differing on the one feature the sentence pins down.

Notice that all four are defeated by the same move. A sufficiently specific sentence eliminates the associate immediately, records the direction, fixes the degree, and names the feature that separates the near-category from the answer.

The figural version is the same puzzle

In a matrix item the terms are shapes and the relation is a transformation — rotate, add an element, change shading, reflect across an axis. The method transfers exactly: state the rule that turns the first cell into the second in one sentence, then apply it. Where matrices get harder is that two or three rules can run at once, one across rows and another down columns, and each has to be named separately. Our piece on saying the matrix rule out loud works a single item through in that style, and the number-sequence equivalent does the same for numerical items.

The common failure across all three formats is identical: recognising that something is related without pinning down what, then choosing on resemblance. Verbal, figural and numerical analogies are the same item wearing different clothes, which is a large part of why they load on general reasoning rather than on the specific content they use.

What practising this does, and does not, do

It makes you better at analogy items. That is worth having, and it is a narrower gain than it feels like. Familiarity with a format raises scores on that format — the practice effect that our piece on retesting quantifies — without necessarily moving the underlying ability the format is trying to estimate. A score improved by format familiarity is a less accurate estimate than the first one, not a better result.

• Worth doing: learning the structure, so that the item is not also a puzzle about what is being asked.
• Worth doing: sitting under realistic conditions, since a score means what it claims only under the conditions the norms were collected in.
• Not worth doing: memorising item banks, which improves scores on those items and nothing else.
• Not worth expecting: a large transfer to unrelated tasks. Gains from practice on a narrow format tend to stay narrow, as our note on brain training apps sets out.

The rule is small enough to carry into the exam room: name the relation in a sentence, then find the pair that takes the sentence. It is not a trick, and it does not manufacture ability you do not have. It removes a layer of confusion between you and the item, which is all any honest technique should claim to do.

Common questions