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Common Core State Standard
LS.CCS.4/5/6 Grades 3-12: Students are asked to determine the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words through multiple choice vocabulary quizzes. Quizzes are designed to help students demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships and nuances in words, acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words, and gather vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or phrase important to comprehension or expression. Students are then asked to find the words within the newspaper and copy the sentence for context to its overall meaning or function in a sentence.
This Week's Word In The News 

COERCE

DEFINITION:
To persuade someone forcefully to do something that they are unwilling to do.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
Lina Kahn, a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said that Google was using its “search monopoly to coerce schools” into adopting its AI.
►The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11/09/2026

Words in the News Quiz
5 High School Words

Click on the correct answer in the quiz below.
Then see if you can find the word in your newspaper -- the print edition, the website or the digital edition and copy the sentence for context. NOTE: High School words are much harder to find!


1. Paradigm

► The clear, yellowish fluid portion of blood, lymph, or intramuscular fluid in which cells are suspended.

► Full of or exhibiting servile compliance; fawning.

► A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality

► A circular strand of DNA in bacteria that contains the hereditary information necessary for cell life.


2. Usurp

► To seize another’s place, authority, or possession wrongfully.

► Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.

► A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

► To modify, as by shortening or simplifying or by skewing the content in a certain manner.


3. Nomenclature

► A system of names used in an art or science:

► Characterized by affected, exaggerated, or insincere earnestness.

► An extremely distant, and thus old, celestial object whose power output is several thousand times that of our entire galaxy.

► Either of two points on the celestial sphere at which the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator.


4. Vehement

► An extremely distant, and thus old, celestial object whose power output is several thousand times that of our entire galaxy.

► Either of two points on the celestial sphere at which the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator.

► A temple tower of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories.

► Characterized by forcefulness of expression or intensity of emotion or conviction; fervid.


5. Circumlocution

► Any of numerous natural and synthetic compounds consisting of up to millions of repeated linked units,

► The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language.

► Lacking or marked by a lack of self-confidence; shy and timid.

► Not limited to or associated with a particular religious denomination.


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