SSAT Analogy Practice Questions

You know the six classic bridges. You know they show up often on Analogy questions. So even if you don’t know the exact definition of one (or both!) words, you could make an educated guess about the bridge. For example, say you saw this stem:
Word is to philologist as…
What might the bridge be? Well, a philologist sounds like a type of person (since it ends in –ologist), and a word is a thing, so maybe a philologist does something with words. Philologist is a tricky word, but you could make a great guess by saying that a philologist studies words, which is exactly right!

Sometimes a word sounds familiar, but you can’t remember why. If that happens, try to think of a place where you may have heard it before. Putting words into context makes it easier to determine their meaning. For example:
Vote is to suffrage as…
What does suffrage mean? Have you heard of the suffrage movement? Or the suffragists? Think about the word suffrage in the context of voting. What could the words have to do with each other? Well, suffrage is the right to vote, and the movement to give women the right to vote at the beginning of the 20th century was commonly known as the Suffrage Movement. Just looking at the word suffrage in isolation might have left you scratching your head, but putting it in context with the concept of voting could get you back on track and help you home in on the right answer.

Some words give you the feeling that they’re either positive or negative. Use this sense to help you figure out the bridge between words in the stem when you don’t actually know what one of them means—or both!
Decide whether the following words are positive or negative:
1. Cruel (+, –) is to clemency (+, –) as
2. Boorish (+, –) is to polite (+, –) as
3. Animated (+, –) is to ecstatic (+, –) as
4. Annoyed (+, –) is to enraged (+, –) as
So how does Word Charge help you find the right answer? Once you determine the charge of the words in the stem pair, you can look for words in the answer choices that have the same charge relationship. When both words in the stem are either positive or negative, both words in the correct answer choice will have the same charge, too, though it may be the opposite charge from the words in the stem. If one stem word is positive and the other is negative, chances are that the right answer will have the same relationship.
So what charge does each word above have?
1. (–, +)
2. (–, +)
3. (+, +)
4. (–, –)