“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”
“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”