More Definitions for analogy. Nglish: Translation of analogy for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of analogy for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Essential Meaning of analogy. Full Definition of analogy. Choose the Right Synonym for analogy likeness , similarity , resemblance , similitude , analogy mean agreement or correspondence in details. Digging Into the Most Common Meaning of Analogy In its most common use, analogy has to do with comparison of things based on those things being alike in some way.
Examples of analogy in a Sentence He does, though, suffer from the occupational deformation of international relations specialists: an enthusiasm for ransacking the past in search of precedents, analogies , patterns, and cycles that might explain the present and forecast the future.
Take the following analogy : I've designed a great new lock pick, and I'm going to give this great new gadget away to show everyone that the typical door lock is ineffective against my new pick. If you want to help your reader understand a concept, make sure you choose an example that is familiar and easy to understand for your readers.
For example, if you want to find an analogy to describe the education of children, it may be simpler to use the analogy of gardening, which most people have some experience with, as opposed to something like boat-building.
While you may want to use an analogy to show how one item is like another, you should also pay attention to how they are different. Take the opportunity to explain these similarities and differences. Sometimes you may even stumble upon important imagery that you can use as you think of possible connections. One mark of a good analogy is that it becomes memorable enough to inspire action.
You can do this by selecting a word or picture that will stay with your readers in the long run. This may possibly be why the parables that Jesus told in the Bible are very memorable: he made analogies using familiar, everyday objects such as wheat, fishing, and digging for treasure. You should also pay attention to clever analogies that you come across while reading; you can copy them down in a notebook for a collection of effective analogies!
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English is particularly complex when it comes to analogies in both everyday speech and as literary devices , but with practice you can become more adept at teasing apart the meaning of these creative comparisons to enrich your understanding and your expression.
All rights reserved. Analogy Examples. Examples of Analogies in Speech and Writing Many analogies are so useful that they are part of everyday speech. Each analogy below makes a comparison between two things: Finding a good man is like finding a needle in a haystack: As Dusty Springfield knows, finding a small needle in a pile of hay takes a long time, so the task at hand is likely to be hard and tedious.
That's as useful as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: It looks like you're doing something helpful but really it will make no difference in the end. Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process: E. B White's famous analogy shows that sometimes it's better not to know too much. That movie was a roller coaster ride of emotions: While you're not flying through the air, the twists, turns and surprises of a movie plot can leave you feeling like you've been through quite an experience.
Life is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're gonna get: An often-used analogy from Forrest Gump shows that life has many choices and surprises, just like a box of chocolates.
Consider these examples of analogies from famous writers and public figures: "I am to dancing what Roseanne is to singing and Donald Duck to motivational speeches.
I am as graceful as a refrigerator falling down a flight of stairs. The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. Most students I have encountered think they appreciate the analogy, but it doesn't help them because they haven't fully understood hydraulic systems. Ask them a question such as this, to see whether they understand it correctly: Consider a steady DC current, with the electrons moving through a resistor in a circuit.
The average kinetic energy is the same going out as in. After all, Kirchoff's laws, which students claim to "know," require that the current be the same on either side of the resistor, and charge is not created or destroyed in the resistor, so what goes in, comes out.
It's electrical potential energy that's converted to thermal energy. Now ask students how this works in hydraulics, when water flows through a section of pipe filled with a water filter resistor. The input and output pipe cross sectional areas are the same. Again, the water speed in and out is the same, it's the potential energy associated with the pressure difference across the filter that's converted to thermal energy.
The resistor warms up, indicating that electrical energy is converted to thermal energy. This energy comes from the battery, of course. So what do the electrons have to do with the transfer of energy from battery to resistor? Can they be considered "carriers" of energy? If not, what is? Yes, the electrons are carriers, just as a line of automobiles at rush hour going at constant speed down a hill must lose the potential energy they gain from going downhill by applying their brakes, converting that potential energy to thermal energy.
An analogy! This is a fairly harmless analogy. Many classical light phenomena are demonstrable in a mathematically correct way using water waves, but with some obvious exceptions: The water waves have only one polarization direction. The water waves require a medium, light doesn't. In the essentially two-dimensional ripple tank, the wave energy propagates by an inverse first power law, not an inverse square law.
The water waves have no good analogy with photons. Comparison of magnetic "poles" to point charges. Simanek Here's a statement of teaching philosophy on a physics job application: The use of analogies from everyday life helps students to understand concepts better, to realize that it is mostly the same physical arguments that explain phenomena they see around them.
Anyone who has been in a marching band will find this argument rather unconvincing. Only a poorly trained marching band will refract on crossing the interface between astroturf and blacktop. Bands are trained to maintain a constant stride whatever the terrain. Does this analogy give any correct insight about the underlying mechanism of light refraction? If the marching band crossed a curved interface, would the ranks focus to a point, or diverge in many directions?
Does the analogy work for reflection? Imagine a marching band undergoing total internal reflection at the stadium wall! If only one marching file were present, would refraction occur? Probably not. The reason a well-trained marching group maintains straight ranks is because marchers are taught to "guide right".
If a very narrow beam of light falls on an interface, it still refracts. There's nothing analogous to "guiding right" on the rest of the wave front in the case of light. The two results are identical in the limit of small angles, but that's small consolation. We even did a laboratory exercise exploring this relation quantitatively. Iron filings and bar magnet show field lines. This isn't done anymore, because as a magnet and iron filings clearly show, the "poles" of a magnet are not localized very well, so it's hard to find r precisely.
Field lines. On hearing this I wondered, "who counted them? Later when we got to motors and generators we heard a lot about "cutting field lines," and wondered if they snapped like rubber bands when you cut them. After all, our professor had said that at one time fields were thought of as elastic strain in the ether, but that physicists no longer believed in the ether.
Are analogies ever useful in scientific discovery? You may ask, "Don't analogies often play a useful role in science, at least in the early stages of concept formation, and in the preliminary models used to describe new phenomena?
Yes, one can cite a number of historical examples of analogies that paved the way to new understanding. It's a mixed bag. In my view some analogies may have been productive in the early stages of model formation, but became a hindrance later on, especially when they were held too long. The picture is also biased by the selective memory of history.
We remember and recount the successful examples, and sweep the failures under the rug. Here are a few cases worth considering: Galileo argued that the four moons of Jupiter were analogous to the Copernican model of the solar system. He had no more argument than that to go on, for the celestial mechanics of Kepler and Newton were not yet available.
Galileo's critics were entirely justified in dismissing the force of this analogy, but they were guilty of even more blatant analogies in their own arguments. Kepler's harmony of the spheres associating a tune with each planet. Kepler's solar system model with nested spheres and Pythagorean solids.
Johannes Kepler was led astray many times in his search for a planetary model by arguments from analogy. Examples: The music of the spheres. The Sun as a magnet. The spheres nested with pythagorean solids. Kepler didn't formulate his famous three laws of planetary motion until he abandoned all of these and devised a purely mathematical model. Much of the problem with the luminiferous ether was due to people arguing that light must be analogous to sound and other "material" waves.
The early forms of the Bohr model of the atom were presented in textbooks by analogy with the solar system. Some early textbooks showed precessing orbits of electrons. The deficiencies of this analogy are spelled out in most atomic and nuclear texts, and include: 1 inconsistency of a deterministic orbit with the uncertainty principle, 2 the fact that the accelerating electron in a circular orbit does not radiate away energy, and 3 how can the orbit of a zero angular momentum state pass right through the nucleus?
Harmless pedagogical analogies? I have frequently challenged physics teachers to tell me how well a student could do on their exams if the student understood nothing, but had eidetic imagery, the ability to memorize anything perfectly. Could that student pass the course?
Rarely does any teacher assure me that such a student would flunk. There are a few relatively harmless analogies in physics teaching. The mousetrap and cork demo illustrating a nuclear chain reaction. For those who haven't seen it, this demo has a large plexiglass or wire mesh cage in which there are many mousetraps filling the bottom, all set to spring, with two corks on each. A cork is tossed in the cage, which may spring a trap.
If if doesn't, another is tossed in until one trap is sprung, and its corks will go flying and fall on other traps, springing them. A chain reaction of flying corks and bouncing mousetraps ensues. The action is over in a short time, leaving a jumbled mess to be painstakingly reset for the next class demo. The analogy is to a fissioning atom giving off on average two neutrons, which trigger other atoms to fission in a chain reaction. Comments: To compare mousetraps and corks to atoms and neutrons is obviously a huge stretch.
Also the detailed physical processes of springing the trap and the bouncing of corks from the cage have no counterpart in atoms. Yet I see very little harm arising from this demo. No student is likely to generalize it too far.
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