Select the word-pair that best represents a similar relationship to the one expressed in the pair of words given below. (The words must be considered as meaningful English words and must not be related to each other based on the number of letters/number of consonants/vowels in the word.) Larva : Insect

Correct — B.

Rule: the first word names the young or immature form of the second.

A larva is the immature stage of an insect, the form it takes after the egg and before the adult.

A fawn is a young deer. The two pairs stand in the same young-to-adult relation, so option (b) matches.

The bracketed note bars letter counts and vowel counts, so the words have to be read for meaning alone.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Dog : Animal — Dog and Animal is class inclusion — a dog is a kind of animal. A larva is not a kind of insect in that sense, it is a stage an insect passes through.
• (c)
  Fox : Vixen — Fox and Vixen is male to female, not young to adult. A vixen is an adult female fox, not a young one.
• (d)
  Bat : Chick — The two words are not a pair at all. A chick is the young of a bird, but a bat is not the adult that a chick grows into.

Word-pair analogies turn on naming the relation precisely before you look at the options. Young of is a distinct relation, and English gives it its own vocabulary — larva, fawn, cub, calf, foal, cygnet.

The two relations most often chosen by mistake sit right beside it: kind of, as in dog and animal, and male and female, as in fox and vixen. Both are genuine relations between real things, which is exactly why they read as plausible.

Larva is worth knowing precisely: it is the stage between egg and pupa in insects that undergo complete metamorphosis.

Key facts

• A larva is the immature stage of an insect, following the egg.
• A fawn is a young deer.
• A vixen is an adult female fox, which makes Fox and Vixen a male-to-female pair.
• Complete metamorphosis runs egg, larva, pupa, adult.

Common traps

• Settling for Dog and Animal because both pairs feel like general against specific.
• Reading Bat and Chick as a young-of pair because chick is a young bird.

No directly related past PYQ was found.