What verbal reasoning measures
Verbal reasoning is about meaning and the links between words: knowing that candid and secretive are opposites, that a glove is to a hand what a sock is to a foot, or which word in a list does not belong with the rest. Unlike pattern puzzles, it leans on crystallized intelligence — the vocabulary and knowledge you accumulate over a lifetime — which is why it tends to hold up, and even grow, well into adulthood.
The questions above cover the standard families: synonyms and antonyms, word analogies, odd-one-out by category, and sentence completion where the surrounding words point to the missing one. The skill being exercised is the same throughout: read precisely, name the relationship, and rule out the near-misses.
How to get better at these
For analogies, say the relationship out loud as a short sentence — “an author creates a book” — then test each option against that exact phrasing; the right answer fits the wording, the distractors only feel related. For synonyms and antonyms, eliminate first: cross out the words that are clearly off, and you are usually left with a clean choice between two. And the slow, compounding move is simply reading widely, which is the only thing that reliably grows the word stock these questions draw on.
Keep expectations honest. Practice and reading expand your vocabulary and make the formats quicker to parse — both genuinely helpful — but think of it as learning words, not as re-wiring your IQ.