The SAT embeds certain tricks in its analogy questions to trip up the careless and to lure the confused. Such tricks are most common among difficult questions, which can be particularly troublesome since tricks work most effectively when you are already a little confused. All of the tricks used by ETS on analogy questions are designed to make a wrong answer look like the right one. When you have little time and desperately want to find the right answer, those “attractive” wrong answers become very enticing.

If you know the tricks are lurking out there, you will be much less likely to fall into their diabolical clutches. Plus, if you learn to identify an answer choice as a trick, you can use that knowledge to eliminate it. After all, if an answer choice is a trick, it can’t be the right answer.

One kind of SAT analogy trickery involves the use of an answer pair in which one of the words is somehow associated with one of the words in the stem pair. Take a look at the example:

The correct answer for this question is (D) dam : river, since a dam stops the flow of a river in the same way that a BANDAGE stops the flow of BLOOD. However, let’s say you didn’t immediately see the answer and had to scour through the answer choices. BANDAGE : BLOOD conjures images of pain and injury, as does the answer choice cast : injury. Because the words in this answer pair are related to those in the stem pair, you might be tempted to think it is the correct answer. Don’t be. The relation between cast and injury is very different from that between BANDAGE and BLOOD. (In fact, the relation between a cast and an injury isn’t clear; an injury is too general a term to have any real relation to a cast, which is used to immobilize broken bones but is unrelated to injuries like burns.)

To avoid the SAT trap of bogus associations, you should make sure to focus on the relation between the words in the analogies rather than on the words themselves. Also, when you see a word in an answer pair that is similar or closely associated with a word in the stem pair, be suspicious. Now that you are aware that this type of trap exists on the SAT, you should be able to avoid it.

As discussed earlier in this section, word order is extremely important in analogies. EYE : VISION cannot be related to HEARING : EAR because the two relations are flipped. The SAT will sometimes give you questions with the answers flipped, such as:

In this example, a barber uses scissors for his job, just as a PAINTER uses his PALETTE, but the order of the two word pairs is reversed. Barber : scissors cannot be the answer. (The correct answer is saddle : jockey). When you pick an answer, be sure that its words are in the same order as those in the stem pair. You might want to touch each word with your pencil when you insert it into your sentence to remind you to check for the correct word order.

On harder analogies, you will often come across difficult vocabulary, some of which you might not know. So how can you possibly form a sentence to relate two words you don’t know? And if you can’t form a sentence, how can you even try to answer the question?

There are a few strategies to help you come to an answer if you don’t know the vocabulary of one or even both words in the stem pair. Using these strategies may occasionally enable you to come to a single answer. More likely, the strategies will help you to eliminate two or three of the answer pairs, putting you in a good position to guess.

If you can’t form a relational sentence because you don’t know one of the stem words in an analogy, you obviously won’t be able to identify an answer immediately. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost. Remember, because SAT questions are multiple-choice, the answer is always right there in front of you. So if you can’t pick it out of the crowd, perhaps you can eliminate the crowd around it.

There’s a handy two-step method that will help you to eliminate incorrect analogy answer choices.

Often, the words in an answer pair will not be very well related. If that is the case, you can eliminate that answer pair. Stem words always have a strong relation to each other, so the words in the correct answer pair will too. Here’s the strategy in action:

Answer choices (B), (C), (D), and (E) all have fairly good relations. A claimant desires to ascend to the throne, a soldier is a member of a platoon, an attorney works at a trial, and a boss heads a business. However, leader : office does not have a very good relation—a leader might work in an office, but he or she certainly doesn’t have to. Therefore, you can eliminate (A) as a possible answer. Now you’re down to four choices, shifting the odds in your favor.

We’ll use the same example we did before. Remember, (A) has already been eliminated. In (B), a claimant desires to ascend to the throne. Can you imagine the unknown word means “someone who wants to ascend to government”? Seems unlikely, so you can eliminate (B). In (C), a soldier is a member of a platoon. Could the unknown word mean “member of a government”? Possibly. Keep it. In (D), an attorney works at a trial. Is there a name for a person who “works in government”? Seems likely, though you might notice that an attorney working at a trial is not quite the same thing as a bureaucrat working in a government. This relation is possible, but it’s not as good as (C). If guessing, you probably shouldn’t choose this one. In (E), a boss heads a business. Could the word mean “head of the government”? Possibly. Keep this one too.

After employing the two-step process, we were able to eliminate two answer pairs. Further, while we weren’t willing to entirely eliminate (D), we did have the sense that it wasn’t as good as the other two we kept. So we have to guess between (C) and (E), which leaves our odds for getting the question right at 50 percent. Not bad for an analogy in which we didn’t even know the meaning of one of the words.

If you don’t know either of the stem words in an analogy, you can still look through the answers to see if any of the pairs has a bad internal relation. If you can eliminate even one possibility this way, it’s in your favor to guess. If you can’t eliminate any, you should move on to another question.