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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 

ACCOST

DEFINITION:
To approach and speak to (someone) in an often challenging or aggressive way.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
As their identities became more public, the operators were even accosted in their off hours.
►The Anchorage Daily News, 09/21/2026

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. Laissez faire

► Noninterference in the affairs of others.

► A part, portion, or share.

► Belonging to the period before a war, especially the American Civil War.

► Logical incongruity


2. Polymer

► Belonging to the period before a war, especially the American Civil War.

► Logical incongruity

► A place or situation regarded as drawing into its center all that surrounds it.

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


3. Taxonomy

► Warlike in manner or temperament; pugnacious.

► Division into ordered groups or categories.

► Impossible to dispute; unquestionable

► Very talkative; garrulous.


4. Gamete

► Shaking and vibration at the surface of the earth resulting from underground movement along a fault plane.

► A reproductive cell having the haploid number of chromosomes, especially a mature sperm or egg capable of fusing with a gamete of the opposite sex to produce the fertilized egg.

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

► Deception by trickery or sophistry.


5. Quasar

► To divide (a geographic area) into voting districts so as to give unfair advantage to one party in elections.

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

► Interchanged, given, or owed to each other.

► To remove erroneous, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise objectionable material from (a book, for example) before publication.


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