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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 

OVERZEALOUS

DEFINITION:
Showing too much energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or objective.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
Patrolmen’s Association, the city’s largest police union, attributed the encounter to an “overzealous poll worker who was complaining to the officer that the councilor shouldn’t have even been inside.”
The Boston Herald, 11/17/2025

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. Quarantine

Enforced isolation or restriction of free movement imposed to prevent the spread of contagious disease.

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

One who habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others without making any useful return.

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


2. Boycott

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

To condescend to give or grant

An unstable, poisonous allotrope of oxygen.

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


3. Voracious

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

Consuming or eager to consume great amounts of food; ravenous.

To take in by elaborate methods of deceit

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


4. Protagonist

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

The main character in a drama or other literary work.

The food-conducting tissue of vascular plants, consisting of sieve tubes, fibers, parenchyma, and sclereids.

Inspiring awe, admiration, or wonder


5. Tundra

To move back or away from a limit, point, or mark

A treeless area between the icecap and the tree line of Arctic regions, having a permanently frozen subsoil and supporting low-growing vegetation

An intricate structure of interconnecting passages through which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.

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


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