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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 

ACQUAINTANCE

DEFINITION:
A person one knows slightly, but who is not a close friend.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
When photographer Peter Turnley was just 20 years old, an acquaintance from the California Office of Economic Opportunity reached out to him with a question.
The Los Angeles Times, 12/01/2025

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. Vacillate

A characteristic rate or rhythm of activity; a pace

Harmful, malevolent, injurious. Harmfully cancerous.

To swing indecisively from one course of action or opinion to another.

Any of various nonplacental mammals, including kangaroos, opossums, bandicoots, and wombats, found principally in Australia and the Americas.


2. Exult

To rejoice greatly; be jubilant or triumphant

In a deplorable state of distress or misfortune; miserable.

A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.

An elevated, comparatively level expanse of land; a tableland.


3. Technique

The systematic procedure by which a complex or scientific task is accomplished.

The act of reasoning from factual knowledge or evidence.

The drawing of a conclusion by reasoning; the act of deducing.

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.


4. Sect

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.

A Y-shaped protein on the surface of B cells that is secreted into the blood or lymph in response to an antigenic stimulus

A cult or religious movement, a group sharing particular (often unorthodox) political and/or religious beliefs.

A drawing consisting of the outline of something, especially a human profile, filled in with a solid color.


5. Alliteration

Incorrectness of reasoning or belief

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 repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables

The locus of points for which the sum of the distances from each point to two fixed points is equal


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