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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. Enthusiastic

► The quality or state of being tranquil; serenity.

► Inspiring awe, admiration, or wonder

► A movement or procedure involving skill and dexterity.

► Having or demonstrating enthusiasm


2. Xylem

► The supporting and water-conducting tissue of vascular plants, consisting primarily of tracheids and vessels; woody tissue.

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

► The distribution of energy emitted by a radiant source, arranged in order of wavelengths.

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


3. Salmonella

► The distribution of energy emitted by a radiant source, arranged in order of wavelengths.

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

► A cult or religious movement, a group sharing particular (often unorthodox) political and/or religious beliefs.

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


4. Decorum

► Appropriateness of behavior or conduct

► An alteration or change, as in nature, form, or quality.

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

► A state of uncertainty or perplexity.


5. Dialogue

► To swing indecisively from one course of action or opinion to another.

► Conversation between characters in a drama or narrative

► An unstable, poisonous allotrope of oxygen.

► A treeless area between the icecap and the tree line of Arctic regions, having a permanently frozen subsoil and supporting low-growing vegetation


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