People who do read (sorry for thinking you didn't) find vocab ridiculously easy, while people who don't find it really hard. Vocab lists are not a good way of learning words compared to just reading books that have those words in them. It is very hard to explain why this is, until you watch someone who doesn't read a lot try to memorise the meaning of words.
Analogies are a legitimate IQ test, (accepted by Mensa, for what that is worth). The Miller Analpgies Test is the normal one, but is essentially what the GRE and old SAT had. It correlates with g with a rho of 0.75.
Standard IQ tests (WISC) have a r of 0.85 with Collin's WRIT verbal.
> why are those analogies trivial for smart people specifically?
It is hard to explain, but smart people can do analogies, and less smart people can't. There is no real trick to be learned. It is either obvious to you or it isn't.
> I think people massively underweight the extent to which forcing kids to repeatedly do old SATs can raise their eventual grade
The old SAT with analogies was much harder to get people to improve on, as it was more g loaded. On the other hand, smart people found it much easier.
> “banal” in particular would surely have been in my top ten!
banal is not in the top 500 standard SAT words. It is not on this list of 1300 either, though platitude and quotidian are. Vocab seems easy, but some people have it and other don't.
Lmao never mind then. Thought you were referring to these books.