Cognition · ~5 minutes

How well do you reason with words?

Fifteen questions — analogies, synonyms, and antonyms — climbing from easy to hard. Harder items count for more, so your score reflects your ceiling, not just the questions you breezed through. This is crystallized ability: the verbal knowledge reading builds over a lifetime.

15 questions · Difficulty-weighted · On-device

Each question offers four choices; pick the single best answer. The questions get harder as you go, and there's no going back once you choose. Work at a comfortable pace — this test rewards knowledge and careful judgment, not speed.

About this instrument

What this measures — and what it doesn't

Measures
Crystallized verbal ability

How well you grasp relationships between words: analogies, shades of meaning, opposites. Unlike fluid reasoning, this draws on knowledge you've built — which is why verbal scores keep rising with reading across a lifetime.
Method
15 graded items, weighted

Five easy, five medium, five hard, drawn from an authored bank and presented easiest-first. Answer options are shuffled each run, and the score weights each item by difficulty so a hard win counts triple an easy one.
Result
Internal index + tier breakdown

You get an internal score index plus how you did at each difficulty — useful for seeing whether you plateau at medium or push into the hard tier. Near-chance accuracy is flagged and the score withheld.
Limits
Honest limits

This is an English-vocabulary test, so it reflects language exposure as much as reasoning — non-native speakers are genuinely disadvantaged, and we say so. Fifteen items is a snapshot, not a normed instrument, and never an aptitude credential.

Scoring & evidence

How the verbal score is built

Fifteen items are sampled evenly from three difficulty tiers. Easy, medium, and hard correct answers carry weights of 1, 2, and 3, then the weighted total is adjusted above the 25% chance level for four-option items and converted to an approximate 1–99 composite. Results are withheld when raw accuracy is 30% or below because a near-chance response pattern is not a stable basis for interpretation.

The score reflects performance on English analogies, synonyms, antonyms, and related verbal relationships. That means language exposure and reading history are part of the construct: this is not language-free reasoning. A multilingual user or someone who has learned English recently may show lower performance without having lower general reasoning ability.

The result is an educational indicator for this item bank, not a clinically normed verbal-IQ score. The browser calculates it locally; no individual answer-upload call is present in the current verbal tool script.

Interpretation standard: observations describe this task; internal indices are model or response summaries, not population rankings. Use the report for education and reflection. See the methodology for limitations.

Go deeper

The science behind this instrument

Theory

Fluid vs crystallized intelligence

Why verbal ability is the clearest example of knowledge you build over a lifetime.

Read Data

How IQ changes with age

Verbal scores rise for decades even as processing speed falls — here's why.

Read Fundamentals

What is IQ, really?

Where verbal reasoning sits in the bigger picture of measured intelligence.

Read

Questions

Before you begin

What does a verbal reasoning test measure?

Your grasp of relationships between words and ideas — through analogies, synonyms, and antonyms. It leans on crystallized intelligence: the vocabulary and verbal knowledge you accumulate through reading and experience, rather than raw processing speed.

Why are harder questions worth more?

Getting an easy item right tells us less than nailing a hard one. The score weights each item by difficulty, so your result reflects the ceiling of your verbal ability, not just how many gentle questions you cleared.

Does this test disadvantage non-native English speakers?

Honestly, somewhat — any English vocabulary test does. Verbal reasoning is inseparable from language exposure, so a lower score can reflect how long you've read in English rather than reasoning ability itself. We flag near-chance results and say this plainly in your results.

Can verbal reasoning improve?

Yes, more than most cognitive skills. Crystallized abilities like vocabulary grow across the whole lifespan through reading, so verbal scores tend to rise with age and exposure. Wide reading is the single most reliable way to improve.

Verbal is one domain. See all five.

The full reasoning assessment maps verbal reasoning alongside pattern, numeric, spatial, and memory.

Start the assessment

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Separate vocabulary from reasoning

An unfamiliar English word can hide an otherwise straightforward relationship. Note new words after the test and practise explaining the relationship in your own words. This is not a language-neutral ability measure.

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How should I use this result?

This is an educational task or self-assessment, not a diagnosis. Read the instructions above for the format and approximate time. Scores describe this task or your reported preferences; research on the underlying concept does not validate this implementation.

The engine calculates results in your browser. Completed report snapshots are saved locally in My AurorIQ; planning tools require an explicit save. You can export or delete saved data at /passport/. Separate hosting, analytics, advertising and optional sharing have separate data implications. Read the privacy notice, methodology, or report an error.