I wonder if this question tests IQ at all. It might be possible that intelligent people are more selective in their knowledge than less intelligent people.
Pain is to rue as bread is to eat.
There would’ve been two or three other optios to choose from such as slice, bake, and knead.
The answer you give would then be compared to the other responses and a profile derived from your response. There need not be a correct answer to the question. It is like your response to a Rorshack test. Your response is what is being test. When show an ink blot and most people see a bird… but you see a bloody axe. Well, that tells them something.
If pain is to rue as bread is to slice. Then you may have an aggressive personality. etc.
knead = you might be creative
eat = selfish
just food for thought 
You don’t knead bread, in the same sense as you don’t toast toast.
No, but you do knead the dough in order to make the bread. Therefore, knead would probably be an “incorrect” answer. It might not even have been an option.
How about slice, butter, toast, and eat as available answers?
They all come after the bread is baked so they would all be “like” rue in that sense.
What your answer might be could then be analyzed and compared to other participants responses and profiled accordingly.
How about ‘Aroma’, or even ‘Taste’ or ‘Flavor’. Anytime I’ve taken these tests they were multiple choice.
Someday I have to open a bread store called “House of Pain” just to see what kind of customers I get.
The Mega Test, from which this question is taken, isn’t a multiple-choice test.
Note also that it isn’t a timed or supervised test; you’re allowed to research your answers. (Obviously this was more difficult and time-consuming before the Interenet.)
The test is no longer posted online, but I remember one of the other analogy questions: Touch is to palpate as sound is to ?. You had to know that the word for using sound to make a medical diagnosis was “auscultate”. I also remember that you had to know that “estivate” was the summer equivalent of “hibernate” and a four-dimensional cube is a “tesseract”.
Otto, on leaving “Stoner’s House of Pots”: That’s totally false advertising, man.
I’m not sure that’s really true. Standardized tests are all more accurate when testing people around the average for the test’s target population. People who are significantly smarter or dumber than the test’s normal audience won’t end up with the same precision in their answers. At the extreme, people who are so smart that they answer every question correctly are completely indistinguishable from one another, and same goes for people so dumb that they can’t answer any of the questions. Obviously one person who gets a perfect score can be smarter or dumber than someone else who does the same, but the test is unable to determine it. No test like that can work for the entire population.
The other problem with the “right” answer is that it has the analogy inside-out. The way it’s phrased, there’s implied to be some relationship between “pain” and “rue”, but the tightest relationship you can really draw is “they’re both French words”. But that’s a loose enough relationship that any English word could have finished it. The analogy would make more sense as “Pain is to bread as rue is to ____”, in which case the relationship is “is the French word for” (so pain is the French word for bread, as rue is the French word for street)
C’est tres vrai!
Here’s another memorable analogy from one of those tests:
60:59 :: neo : ???
And the answer:
praseo
The test seems to require a lot of specific knowledge, such as of the French language. I had thought this was a no-no in IQ tests.