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Analogy questions are the one type of questions I have routinely had no idea how to approach. Even when I read the explanation I often am still confused on how you're supposed to arrive at the answer or even how it's an apt analogy. What are people's strategies?
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For analogy or parallel reasoning questions, I usually don't focus as much on the actual information in the passage, but I instead try and identify the structure of the reasoning. That makes it a little easier to understand for me, because sometimes the question stem can be purposefully confusing.
Hi! I'm not an expert, but what helps me is to identify the premises and the conclusion, and then I try to simplify everything as best as I can.
So, for example, if a premise says "Some dogs like swimming in the pool", I just focus on the quantifier "some" and the fact that the statement is positive. If there's an answer choice that has "most", "none", "all", etc., I would immediately eliminate them because I'm looking for a "some" statement. Or if an answer choice says "some people don't like carrots", I will also eliminate it because the original argument does not contain a negation.
But even more importantly is to make sure that the conclusions match. So if the conclusion says "Therefore, some dogs are good swimmers", then again, I need to make sure that my conclusion has "Some" in it, and that it doesn't contain a negation.
If you want to be faster at this, you will first eliminate all the answer choices that have different conclusions to the one that you're looking for, and then you can read the premises of the ones that are left. Also, if the argument is way too complicated to keep this in mind, then I just encapsulate some ideas into A, B, or C statements. For example, let's say I have this argument: "I am smart, all smart people score 170+ on the LSAT. Therefore, I will score 170+ on the LSAT" If it's too hard for you to keep these ideas in mind, I would just say "All A's are B. A. therefore, B" or whatever it is. If you do this, you're going to be able to see the argument's form. So you would need an answer that says "All As are B; A; So, B". I don't know if that makes sense.