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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 

WRANGLING

DEFINITION:
Moving a person or thing somewhere, usually with difficulty or using force.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
The location in Alexandria, Louisiana, would remove logistical headaches caused by wrangling children from foster homes and shelters across the country and not having anywhere to put them during final preparations for flight.
The Boston Herald, 07/13/2026

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. Laconic

To move back or away from a limit, point, or mark

Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise.

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

A disorderly commotion or disturbance.


2. Voracious

Harmful, malevolent, injurious. Harmfully cancerous.

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

Consuming or eager to consume great amounts of food; ravenous.

To cringe in fear


3. Outrageous

A member of an irregular, usually indigenous military or paramilitary unit operating in small bands in occupied territory to harass and undermine the enemy

One that takes in everything available, as with the mind.

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

Grossly offensive to decency or morality.


4. Gargoyle

Similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.

A very large and destructive wave, generally caused by a tremendous disturbance in the ocean, such as an undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption.

The pattern produced on a photosensitive medium that has been exposed by holography and then photographically developed.

A grotesque ornamental figure or projection.


5. Hypocrisy

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.

To condescend to give or grant

The repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables


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