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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 

FOOTHOLD

DEFINITION:
A position usable as a base for further advance.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
Growing national anxiety over the impact of massive data centers on communities has found a foothold in Greater Boston in the form of Markley’s Lowell location.
The Boston Herald, 08/10/2026

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. Tempo

A characteristic rate or rhythm of activity; a pace

One that is inconvenient, annoying, or vexatious; a bother.

A weather phenomenon in the Eastern Pacific that is precisely equivalent to a hurricane.

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


2. Deign

A weather phenomenon in the Eastern Pacific that is precisely equivalent to a hurricane.

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

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

To condescend to give or grant


3. Malignant

An embankment built to prevent flooding

Harmful, malevolent, injurious. Harmfully cancerous.

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

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


4. Symbiosis

A relationship of mutual benefit or dependence.

One who rejects a religion, cause, allegiance, or group for another; a deserter.

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. Deduction

Exceeding the limits of propriety or good manners; improperly forward or bold

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

Having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective.

Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise.


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