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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 

TESTY

DEFINITION:
Marked by impatience or ill humor.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
Unions representing sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and lifeguards made a public pitch Thursday for more support in increasingly testy contract negotiations, releasing a half-hour documentary that highlighted their members’ harrowing tales from the first days of the fires.
►The Los Angeles Times, 04/28/2025

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. Bandolier

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

► A drawing consisting of the outline of something, especially a human profile, filled in with a solid color.

► An ammunition belt, worn over the shoulder, having loops or pockets for cartridges.

► To have a great ambition or ultimate goal

2. Vacillate

► A preparation of a weakened or killed pathogen.

► Similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.

► One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol.

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

3. Quandary

► Of, relating to, or occurring in the night

► A schedule of prices or fees.

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

► A state of uncertainty or perplexity.

4. Camouflage

► Having a backbone or spinal column.

► The method or result of concealing personnel or equipment from an enemy by making them appear to be part of the natural surroundings

► Strikingly unconventional and far-fetched in style or appearance; odd

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

5. Hypocrisy

► A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.

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

► The locus of points for which the sum of the distances from each point to two fixed points is equal

► To pound, crush, or grind to a powder or dust.

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