[A] subject’s ability to function at the upper intellectual levels is determined largely by the number and variety of concepts at his command and on his ability to see relationships between them.
Lewis Terman, The Gifted Child Grows Up, p. 128
The tests below constitute a series designed to measure both the breadth of your vocabulary and your ability to recognize relationships between the concepts denoted by words using a multiple-choice format.
Each test has 10 items. In each item, you will be given an incomplete analogy of the form "Word 1 is to Word 2 as Word 3 is to ...". Your task is to select the one option among four answer choices that completes the analogy.
A choice completes an analogy when it has the same relationship to Word 3 that Word 2 has to Word 1.
While many analogy tests belong both to the verbal and informational content domains, the content on the tests below has been limited to the verbal domain. The items in the test below cover "vocabulary words" and their relationships, and do not require general knowledge, academic or specialist knowledge, or knowledge of trivia.
Most of the words in the items below are abstract, and concrete words, where they appear, serve to test understanding of the meaning of the abstract words with which they appear.
These tests are also ultimately an assessment of the ability to discern possible relationships between words and retrieve knowledge of various, unspecified relationships between English words, which include the relations of synonymy, antonymy, and part-of-speech correspondence, among others. This is one aspect of vocabulary knowledge, or general vocabulary ability, which is itself one part of verbal ability.
As the quote above suggests, tests involving the analogical presentation of vocabulary are highly regarded in the professional intelligence testing community.
Analogy questions similar in nature to the ones on these tests appeared at one time on both the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). The SAT is still used as an undergraduate admissions test, and the GRE is still used as an admissions test for graduate programs, but neither of them still features analogy questions like these.
On the old versions of these standardized tests, the analogy questions took the alternative form:
A is to B as...
(1) C is to D.
etc.
where the letters above stand for unspecified words. Each item had five answer choices.
These SAT and GRE analogies included both verbal and informational content, but the verbal content was more prominent.
Analogy items were removed from the SAT in 2005, and they were removed from the GRE in 2011. This was probably done to make the content of these tests more similar to the content that students would encounter in high school and college.
For more information on the relationship between vocabulary and intelligence, please see the information about context concerning the Word Synonyms Tests on this website.