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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 

COERCE

DEFINITION:
To persuade someone forcefully to do something that they are unwilling to do.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
Lina Kahn, a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said that Google was using its “search monopoly to coerce schools” into adopting its AI.
►The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11/09/2026

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. Hieroglyphic

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

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

► 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.

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


2. Parasite

► Either of two times of the year when the sun is at its greatest distance from the celestial equator.

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

► An unstable, poisonous allotrope of oxygen.

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


3. Metaphor

► A diffuse mass of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness

► One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol.

► Any of several rod-shaped bacteria, of the genus Salmonella, that cause food poisoning and other diseases.

► The main character in a drama or other literary work.


4. Embargo

► A prohibition by a government on certain or all trade with a foreign nation

► A dense evergreen forest occupying a tropical region with an annual rainfall of at least 100 inches.

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

► The branch of biology that deals with animals and animal life, including the study of the structure, physiology, development, and classification of animals.


5. Boycott

► A person authorized to act as representative for another; a deputy.

► 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 move in waves or with a smooth, wavelike motion.

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


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