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Words in the News

This Week's Word In The News 

THRESHOLD

DEFINITION:
A level, point, or value at which something is true.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
Child poverty — an assessment of whether pretax income for households with children falls below the latest poverty threshold — declined more significantly in New Mexico in the last three years, dropping from an estimated rate of 24.2% between 2022 and 2024 to 20.9% from 2023 to 2025.
►The Albuquerque Journal, 09/28/2026

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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. Incognito

► Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.

► Feeling or showing haughty disdain.

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

► Having one’s true identity concealed.


2. Irony

► To picture falsely; misrepresent.

► The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.

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

► To separate or get rid of (an undesirable part); eliminate.


3. Tectonic

► Architectural.

► To seize another’s place, authority, or possession wrongfully.

► Not limited to or associated with a particular religious denomination.

► Physics that deals with the relationships and conversions between heat and other forms of energy.


4. Auspicious

► Attended by favorable circumstances; propitious.

► Having unlimited or universal power, authority, or force; all-powerful.

► A part, portion, or share.

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


5. Notarize

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

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

► To certify or attest to (the validity of a signature on a document, for example) as a notary public.

► A form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life,


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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.