Monday, 28 October 2013

Tips for Answering Analogies


1: To find the relationship between the stem words (the words in capital letters), form a simple sentence that links the two words and illustrates their meaning. Then plug in the choices.

2: If more than one choice fits your sentence, go back and make your sentence more specific or look for a nuance that you missed.

3: You can automatically eliminate any answer choice containing a triangular nonrelationship. In a triangular nonrelationship, the two words are related to a third word, but not directly to each other. For example:

WEIGHT:AGE
SALT:PEPPER
IRRIGATIONS:FERTILIZER
LEMON:ORANGE

In each word pair, both are related to something, but not to each other.

4: You can automatically eliminate any answer choice containing words that are not related in a clear and necessary way.

5: Never initially eliminate a choice if you are uncertain of the meaning of either word in it. You can’t be positive that two words are unrelated if you have no idea what one of the words means.

6: When you don’t know the meaning of one of the words in the stem, work backwards from the choices.

7: You can improve the effectiveness of working backward by using information in the problem to decode the unknown word in the stem.

8: If you know both words in the stem, you can sometimes eliminate a choice even if you don’t know one of the words, by determining whether any word could create a relationship like the stem relationship.

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