
David Gwyn J. answered 10/24/20
Highly Experienced Tutor (Oxbridge graduate and former tech CEO)
It's a reasoning / IQ test. It's non-verbal (using matrices, or geometric designs).
Its relative language independence is an advantage is some situations. However, I'm not sure how accepted it is as an IQ test (I think Mensa accepts Stanford-Binet and Cattell, but not Raven's).
Wikipedia has the scoop at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices