GRE Prep – Secrets of Analogies

When it comes to the Verbal Reasoning section of the GRE one of your greatest assets will be your mastery of vocabulary. This is especially true when it comes to the analogy portion of the exam. Unlike in the Reading Comprehension and Sentence Completion questions this type of question lacks context that might help you deduce the meaning of a word you do not know.

Remember in the analogy portion of the GRE you will be presented with a pair of words and then 5 pairs of words that are possible answers. The correct answer is the pair of words that shares the same relationship as the words in your question pair.

Here is an example from the official ETS site:

COLOR : SPECTRUM

A)     Tone : Scale

B)      Sound : Waves

C)      Verse : Poem

D)     Dimension : Space

E)      Cell : Organism

To approach analogy questions you must first determine the relationship between the question words. The easiest way to do this is to come up with a simple sentence that illustrates the relationship. Ideally, this sentence will also implicitly define one word in terms of the other.

For instance “A spectrum is an ordered series of colors”. This is a good example because there are some possible answer pairs that almost fit into this sentence. A poem is a series of verses, but does not require verses to be in a particular order. Because of the ordered relationship between colors and spectrum the best answer is A) tone : scale because the relationship has a similar ordered nature.

When creating your sentence make sure to keep the words in the same relative positions in the sentence. You do not have to write down the left hand word first in the sentence, but you must be consistent across all word pairs.

A few common GRE relationships are as follows:

• Blank is a type of blank.
• Blank is use to blank.
• Blank is a degree of blank.
• Blank is characterized by blank.
• Someone with blank lacks blank.