Membership is what is being sorted, not association: "cello" belongs under "Musical instruments" and "pliers" under "Hand tools", which means every item here has exactly one correct group.
Why the other answers tempt
Being connected to a group is not the same as being a member of it: a hammer and a nail are related, but only one is a tool.
If they are stuck, say this
Finish the sentence "this is a kind of..." for each word, then match your ending to a heading.
Four of these words belong to the same family. Send them into the circle, then put the odd one on the pedestal.
Verbal odd-one-out questions hide a category, and the wrong answers are chosen because they look related to it. The mistake is asking yourself which word feels different, because feelings are easy to argue with. Ask instead what the others have in common and force yourself to say it as a full sentence, then test that sentence on all five words. Here the sentence is "you can live in it": a bungalow, a cottage, a castle and a flat all pass, and a chimney fails, because a chimney is attached to a home rather than being one. A sentence that is true for exactly four words and false for one is the rule. If your sentence is true for all five, or for only three, it is the wrong sentence and you need another one.
What to say if they get stuck
Tap a word to send it towards the circle. If it belongs, it settles into a seat by itself.
One word keeps getting pushed back out. Say what the other four have in common as a full sentence.
Four of them are whole places. The fifth is only a part of a place.
How group words by relation differs from the skills beside it
The same exercise practises one other skill, and telling them apart is often the difficulty rather than the exercise itself. On this page the skill is: group words or pairs that share one semantic relation, and it stops where excludes visual classification.
Classify one pair or group by its semantic relationship. Excludes analogy transfer to a new pair.
Questions parents ask about group words by relation
Answered from what the skill map records about this skill, not from a template. Every answer here is on the page, and the same questions are the page's FAQ structured data.
Group words or pairs that share one semantic relation. It is one of 26 named verbal reasoning skills in the 11+, in the classification strand, and this page carries 1 interactive exercise that practises it.
Being connected to a group is not the same as being a member of it: a hammer and a nail are related, but only one is a tool. The wrong answers on this skill are built out of that, not out of random numbers, so it is worth naming out loud before your child meets it under time pressure.
Point at the next move rather than explaining the whole rule. Finish the sentence "this is a kind of..." for each word, then match your ending to a heading.
The skill map draws the line here: Excludes visual classification. A question past that line is testing a different named verbal reasoning skill, which is worth knowing before you spend a week practising the wrong one.
Use The Word Family, embedded on this page. It is the exercise the skill map attaches to group words by relation, it runs in the browser with no account to make, nothing is scored, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere. It also has its own link, so you can send it to a child without sending them anywhere else first.
Verbal reasoning is a set of question types, not a subject to revise
A free diagnostic works out which of the codes, analogies, word puzzles and logic types are already secure, and which are not.
