Number Analogy Test With Answers
One pair of numbers shows you a rule; the next pair is missing its second half. A free online number analogy test: 12 items, 4 options each, a few minutes, no account, everything generated and scored in your browser. Every answer is explained the moment you give it — right or wrong, you get the rule in words with your own numbers in it — and at the end the whole run is listed out: each pair, what you picked, what the answer was, and why. The result itself is your count, your mean time and the rules that held you up.
Take the test
Find what turns the first number into the second, then do the same to the third. Keys 1–4 work too.
2 is to 7 as 4 is to ?
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of 12 analogies solved
A clean run: the multiplicative rules came apart as quickly as the additive ones, including the two-step one. Time is the thing left to improve.
Most of the run came apart. What usually survives is “multiply, then add” — one pair is enough to see that adding alone does not explain it, and not always enough to see what does.
About half. That is the ordinary shape of a first run: the additive pairs go quickly and the two-step ones need a second look, which is exactly what the per-rule tally below shows.
Fewer than half this time. One twelve-item run in a browser tab says nothing about you in general — it is a warm-up, and the same four rules come back on the next one.
- Add the same amount
- — / 4
- Multiply by the same number
- — / 4
- Square it
- — / 2
- Multiply, then add
- — / 2
Each explanation holds for up to 4.3 s — click the card, or press Space or Enter, to move on sooner.
12 analogies, easy ones first, each one explained as soon as you answer. There is no time limit — the clock exists only so the result can tell you how long you took. Nothing is uploaded; it all stays in this tab.
Your answers, with the rule for each
Every analogy of the run you just took: what you were shown, what you tapped, what the answer was, and the rule behind it. The rules are read off the items themselves, so nothing here is a general description of the format — it is what these 12 were actually built from.
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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That was a single run. In the app it becomes a short daily session, with a Focus Index to show for it.
Point your camera at the code — the App Store opens.
What a number analogy is
A number analogy is two pairs of numbers and one rule that has to fit both of them. It is written a : b :: c : ? — read “a is to b as c is to what” — and the work is to find what turns the first number of a pair into the second, then do that same thing to the third.
The rule is the whole item. Take one of the draws printed below: 8 goes with 16, so 2 goes with 4 — and once you can say what happened in the first pair, the second one costs you nothing. Miss the rule and no amount of arithmetic gets you there, which is why the numbers are kept small enough to do in your head.
The format is not the same thing as a number series, though the two are often shelved together. A series gives you one line of terms and asks for the next one; an analogy gives you two separate pairs and asks you to carry a relation across the gap between them. If you want the other one, that is the Number Series Test.
What a number analogy test measures
A relation, not a fact — and with 4 options in front of you, whether you can pick the number the relation actually produces rather than one that merely looks like it belongs.
That two-step move — read a relation off one pair, then carry it to another — is what Charles Spearman called the eduction of relations and correlates, and it has sat at the center of reasoning tests ever since he named it in the 1920s. It is fluid reasoning: nothing here was taught to you, and knowing more arithmetic does not help once the rule is in hand.
What it does not measure is calculation. The numbers stay small on purpose — every pair above works in your head — and the moment you have the rule the last step is trivial. If an item beats you it is because the rule stayed hidden, not because the multiplication did.
Where the wordless version comes from
Analogies with words are older, and they carry a passenger: your vocabulary. A test-taker who has never met the word can fail an item whose relation they would have seen instantly. Numbers are the way around that. Because the terms are digits, the item needs almost no language at all, which is why number analogies became a fixture of the culture-fair tradition — the batteries built after the Second World War to lean as little as possible on schooling, reading and the language a test happens to be printed in — and of the numerical reasoning sections employers still hand out.
The same property is why the format works on a page like this one: it generates by the thousand without repeating itself, it survives translation untouched, and a visitor needs no instructions beyond the shape a : b :: c : ?. The version with the passenger still on board is worth taking too — that is the Verbal Analogy Test, the same machinery over words.
The 4 rules you will meet
12 analogies to a run, drawn fresh each time from these 4 and served easy ones first. Each example below is a real draw from the same generator the test uses — the answer, the part the test withholds, is shown in color.
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Add 5
2 7 4 9
The same amount both times: 2 + 5 = 7, and 4 + 5 = 9. Adding is the reading that fits every pair on this page, which is why an additive answer is never among the wrong options — it would be defensible.
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Multiply by 2
8 16 2 4
A multiplier, not an amount: 8 × 2 = 16, so 2 × 2 = 4. Look at the gaps — 8 in the first pair, 2 in the second. A rule that added a fixed amount would have made them equal.
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Square it
4 16 6 36
16 is 4 times itself, so the answer is 6 times itself: 36. Nothing is added or multiplied by a fixed number here; the relation is a shape, and the second pair is the only place to test it.
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Multiply by 3, then add 2
4 14 3 11
Two steps: 4 × 3 = 12, plus 2 makes 14; the same on 3 gives 11. One pair cannot separate the multiplier from what is added afterwards, which is why this rule is served last.
How to read your result
Three numbers, and they are worth more together than apart.
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The count
How many of the 12 you solved. With 4 options per analogy, tapping at random is worth about 3 of them, so the count only starts saying something above that — and a run of guesses shows up in the time as plainly as in the number.
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The per-rule tally
Which rules actually came apart. Every additive pair solved and both two-step ones missed is a different result from the reverse, even when the count is identical — and it tells you what to look at next time.
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The mean time
Seconds per analogy you solved. Wrong answers are left out on purpose: a fast wrong answer is a fast wrong answer, and folding it in would make giving up quickly look like fluency.
The verdict word under your score is a rough banding of the count and nothing more — the cuts are at 11, 9 and 6 solved. It exists so the number has a sentence attached to it, not because four bands are a finding. Two runs half an hour apart will often land in different bands, which is itself the most useful thing this page can tell you about how much a single run is worth.
What this version cannot tell you
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12 analogies is short
Long enough to meet all 4 rules and get a feel for which ones you spot, not long enough to be a measurement. A run where one lucky guess lands is a run that reads a point higher than it should.
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One pair does not pin one rule
Every example pair here fits several rules at once — 2 : 4 is ×2 and +2 and 2² together. The options are built so that none of the other readings is on a button, which is what makes the item scorable; it also means the answer is sometimes the one that survives elimination rather than the one you derived.
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Your conditions are in the result
A tab in the background, a phone that buzzed, the end of a long day — all of it lands in the time and some of it in the count. Compare your own runs on the same evening rather than your run to anyone else’s.
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It is not a diagnosis or a score
Number analogies appear inside professionally administered batteries, always beside other item types and read by someone qualified. One format on one page is not that, and nothing here turns your count into a score of any kind.
Questions about the number analogy test
Does it show the answers and explain them?
Yes. Every one of the 12 analogies is explained the moment you answer it — right or wrong — with the rule in words and your own numbers in it, so you can see the operation rather than guess at it. When the run ends the whole thing is listed under the card: each analogy as you saw it, the option you picked, the correct answer, and the rule.
Do I need an account?
No. The number analogies are generated in your browser and scored there too — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the result is gone when you close the tab. There is no email box anywhere on this page.
Is this an IQ test?
No. It is one item format — the same number-analogy format that appears on reasoning and IQ test batteries — and it reports only what it actually measured: how many of the 12 you solved, how long you took, and which rules gave you trouble. It does not estimate an IQ, and no single-format test in a browser tab honestly could.
Two of the options look right to me. Which is it?
That should never happen on a number analogy, and it is the one thing this page is built to prevent. Because a single pair fits several rules, every answer another consistent rule would give is excluded from the options before they are shown — the additive reading, the multiplicative one, and every “multiply, then add” variant the pair admits. If you can argue for two buttons on one item, it is a bug worth telling us about.
Do the analogies repeat if I take it again?
The numbers do not — every run is generated from the clock, so you get 12 fresh analogies. What stays the same is the recipe: the same 4 rules, the same mix of 12, and roughly the same easy-to-hard order (neighboring items may swap), which is what makes two of your runs worth comparing.
What counts as a good score?
We publish no norms for our version of number analogies, and anyone quoting a number for a browser test is guessing. Two things are worth knowing. 4 options mean about 3 of the 12 come from chance alone. And only 8 analogies in a run use the two easier rules, so anything above 8 means a squaring or a two-step pair came apart for you. Beyond that, the comparison worth making is with your own earlier runs.
12 analogies is a snapshot. The trend is the point.
In NEURA, number analogies are one task type inside a daily session of 20, picked for you each morning and pushed toward whatever you keep missing — and after three sessions the Focus Index opens, one score with a 14-day trend behind it. That is the part a single page cannot do.
