These questions are designed to help you become accustomed to the various relationships you will see between words on the MAT® exam. While we cannot possibly replicate the exact word relationships on which you will be tested, having experience navigating these examples should help you be more competent and confident when taking the actual test.
Association relationships also involve word meanings, but go further than that relationship. They might illustrate characteristics, order, or things like cause and effect and pair words based on these traits.
In a classification relationship, the word pairs are somehow related regarding how they can be organized. It may involve inclusion in the same group or category, or the words may show a part-to-whole or whole-to-part relationship.
Questions on the entire MAT® exam might contain any of the four types of word relationships (semantic, classification, association, and logical/mathematical). Each is also based on one or more of these subject areas: general life experience, the humanities, language, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. While you cannot possibly review all the knowledge in each of these areas, you can learn how to apply what you already know.
These relationships do not involve semantics, but are, instead, formed by logical and mathematical characteristics. They may involve things like multiples of numbers or sound/letter patterns in words. Understanding the concept of proportion could help you with these questions.
This type of relationship in MAT® questions involves the meanings of the words in the analogy and how they relate to each other. The meanings could vary from similar to opposite. In another semantic relationship, words denote a relationship of intensity or size, and in still others, the related words may be two parts of a whole word or phrase.
We hope that working through our questions has helped you become more comfortable with the test format and the types of questions you might see on the actual test. Please let us know if this worked for you and how you view the whole studying and testing experience. We’d love to hear from you on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, or Twitter. And we’d equally love a note at info@uniontestprep.com.