Imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 14
The tests below constitute a series designed to measure the breadth of your vocabulary, as well as your ability to recognize opposite or opposed concepts in the verbal domain, using a multiple-choice format. These tests aim to measure your knowledge of English vocabulary insofar as it includes knowledge of antonyms and your ability to conceptualize opposition insofar as it is a relation among words and the concepts they represent.
Each test has 10 items. In each item, you will be given an English word. You will also be given five answer choices to choose from. There is only one correct answer. Your task is to choose the answer choice that is most opposite in meaning to the English word.
These tests are an assessment of the ability to retrieve knowledge of the relationship of antonymy between English words, which includes the ability of encoding opposition as a semantic relation. This is one aspect of vocabulary knowledge, or general vocabulary ability, which is itself one part of verbal ability.
The item type found in these tests resembles several item types that are common on professional intelligence tests, all requiring the ability to access knowledge about some relationship that holds between words based on their meanings or to recognize that relationship when words with opposite meanings are presented to you.
Antonym questions identical 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 antonym questions like these.
Antonym items were removed from the SAT in 1994, 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 description of Word Synonyms Tests on this website.