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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 

VERTEBRAE

DEFINITION:
Each of the series of small bones forming the backbone.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
The photographer with The Washington Post who was attacked by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank so badly that several vertebrae were broken said Sunday she was increasingly angry that Israel’s military seems to protect settlers more than the Palestinians they threaten.
►Associated Press, 10/19/2026

Words in the News Quiz
5 Middle 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. Maneuver

► The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.

► A form of a verb that in some languages, such as English, can function independently as an adjective.

► The branch of biology that deals with animals and animal life, including the study of the structure, physiology, development, and classification of animals.

► A movement or procedure involving skill and dexterity.


2. Despondent

► To have a great ambition or ultimate goal

► A teacher and guide in spiritual and philosophical matters.

► A diffuse mass of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness

► Being without or almost without hope


3. Commemorate

► To honor the memory of with a ceremony

► To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion

► The right or privilege of voting; franchise.

► The act of resting or the state of being at rest.


4. Sacrifice

► The act of resting or the state of being at rest.

► Having a buoyant or self-confident air; brisk.

► Forfeiture of something highly valued for the sake of one considered to have a greater value or claim.

► A poisonous substance, especially a protein, that is produced by living cells or organisms.


5. Spectrum

► Relating to a system of writing, such as that of ancient Egypt, in which pictorial symbols are used to represent meaning or sounds or a combination of meaning and sound.

► To stress or emphasize; intensify

► The distribution of energy emitted by a radiant source, arranged in order of wavelengths.

► Harmful, malevolent, injurious. Harmfully cancerous.


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