Determining the Relationship Between Words

A key thing when you’re looking at analogies is to try to determine the relationship between the word pairs. Here, we have “wood” and “fire”. A great way to establish a relationship is to create a sentence (a short sentence) that’s going to explain how the two relate to each other.

You might say, “Wood feeds a fire.” That would be a way to establish the relationship. Now, let’s let’s go look at this sample problem. You have “grass” or “farmer” is to cow. Well, using the sentence that we’ve already created (wood feeds a fire), if we tried to plug in over here, we might say, “Grass feeds a cow,” or we might say, “Farmer feeds a cow.”

Both of those would actually fit the same sentence, so we have to dig a little deeper. What you want to do is fine-tune your sentence. First, we had “wood feeds a fire.” Let’s add to that. Be more descriptive. In what way does wood feed to fire?

Wood feeds a fire and is consumed by the fire. Here, we could say grass feeds the fire and- grass feeds the cow and is consumed by the cow. That would be correct. Farmer feeds the cow and is consumed by that cow.

That might lead to some mad cow disease, but that’s not typically how it works. As you can see, you start with a sentence that connects the two words, creates the relationship, you fine-tune your sentence to dial it in and make it more exact where it excludes the other answer choice and narrows it in on the one that’s going to be correct in this case, which would be “grass”.