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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 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. Precipitous

► Extremely rapid, hasty, or abrupt; precipitate.

► To make an accusation against.

► Attended by favorable circumstances; propitious.

► Warlike in manner or temperament; pugnacious.


2. Photosynthesis

► Logical incongruity

► The process in green plants and certain other organisms by which carbohydrates are synthesized from carbon dioxide and water using light as an energy source.

► A plane curve formed by the intersection of a right circular cone and a plane parallel to an element of the cone.

► A person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples.


3. Ziggurat

► A product of disintegration, destruction, or wearing away; debris.

► A dramatic or literary form of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself or reveals his or her thoughts without addressing a listener.

► A temple tower of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories.

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


4. Fatuous

► The basic unit of currency among participating European Union countries.

► Vacuously, smugly, and unconsciously foolish.

► Of or relating to money

► The iron-containing respiratory pigment in red blood cells of vertebrates.


5. Infrastructure

► Architectural.

► The art or study of correct spelling according to established usage.

► An underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system.

► An advocate of the extension of political voting rights, especially to women.


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