Wild stuff. Here's my current mental analogical model:
bacterium : animal :: computer : botnet
bacterium : animal :: computer : botnet
bacterium : animal :: raspberry pi : kubernetes cluster
A : B :: C : D
Is read as
A is to B as C is to D. The reader is meant to understand the relationship between A and B and how it's similar to the relationship between C and D.
An easy one might be,
basketball : hoop :: hockey puck : net
But they can get quite challenging. And with multiple choice answers present in standardized testing, you often have to understand the complex relationships between many abstract concepts, and evaluate that the abstractions are of a similar type or degree.
They're actually kind of fun.
Here's an example taken from [1] (the source also has excellent discussion as to why they were removed) :
PALTRY : SIGNIFICANCE ::
A. redundant : discussion
B. austere : landscape
C. opulent : wealth
D. oblique : familiarity
E. banal : originality
[1] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-w...
I’ve been surprised a number of times by people not being familiar with this format, but they were only a year or 2 younger than me. (I’m 25)
It’s a nice format for thinking about things, so if people stopped learning it, that seems unfortunate to me.
It's probably just a matter of how strongly your immediate social circle feels about formal logic.