Show:
Literary Devices
Poets
2015 Current Events
2015 Current Events II
New words in the OED
100
"Boom goes the dynamite" is an example of this.
What is onomatopoeia?
100
Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? a) P. Herrick b) William Blake c) William Shakespeare d) Francis Drakea)
William Blake
100
On Jan. 7, a terrorist attack on the French satirical newspaper __________ left 12 people dead. Two days later, the French police killed three terrorists in raids at a printing plant and a kosher supermarket that left the gunmen and four Jewish hostages dead.
What is Charlie Hebdo?
100
Gov. Jerry Brown on April 1 ordered mandatory water use reductions for the first time in _________ history, saying the state’s four-year drought had reached near-crisis proportions after a winter of record-low snowfalls.
What is California?
100
A very large smartphone having a touch screen which is intermediate in size between that of a standard smartphone and that of a tablet computer.
What is a phablet? (fab tablet? phone tablet?)
200
"The frightened wind blew" is an example of this.
What is personification?
200
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark a) William Blake b) William Shakespeare c) Phillip Larkin d) Oliver Nordquist
William Shakespeare
200
A January outbreak of _________ in California, which began at Disneyland, was attributed in part to the disease’s being spread by children who had not been vaccinated. In June California passed a law requiring schoolchildren to receive vaccinations unless there are medical reasons not to do so.
What is Measles?
200
As the 2016 presidential race began to heat up, Republicans took the stage for their first debate in August. Shedding any pretense of civility and party unity, _________ ripped into his rivals and the moderators alike, but also drew fire from Jeb Bush and others who were seeking to stop his breathtaking surge in the polls. By December, Republican irritation with his popularity began giving way to panic as it became increasingly plausible that he could be the party’s standard-bearer and imperil the careers of other Republicans.
What is Donald Trump? (Seriously, does anyone know?)
200
_________ have been in the news a lot in the past year or so—figures from Oxford Dictionaries New Monitor Corpus suggest that after two years of relative silence on the subject of floating skateboards in contemporary written sources, 2014 saw a sudden explosion of interest, and frequency of use is still on the rise.
What is Hoverboard?
300
"This test is a breeze" is an example of this.
What is metaphor?
300
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. a) Nathaniel Hawthorne b) Samuel Clemens c) Phillip Larkin d) JRR Tolkien
Larkin
300
. Speaker John A. Boehner’s unilateral invitation to Prime Minister _________ to address Congress on March 3 turned a foreign policy issue that has had near unanimous support in both parties — Israel — into a political showdown that inflamed relations between the United States and Israel for more than a month.
Who is Benjamin Netanyahu?
300
The Environmental Protection Agency accused the German automaker _________ in September of using software that could be used to cheat on emissions tests. The programming has been installed in more than 11 million cars worldwide.
What is Volkswagen?
300
The blasé interjection ___, expressing indifference or a lack of enthusiasm, was probably popularized by the U.S. cartoon series the Simpsons (a powerful influence on the vocabulary of contemporary English), but it was in use online by 1992—two years before it was first uttered on the programme. (3-letter word)
What is meh?
400
"The man's hands were wrinkled like the desert sand" is an example of this.
What is simile?
400
Look in the skies for God, what you see besides the smog Is broken dreams flying away on the wings of the obscene Thoughts that people put in the air Places where you could get murdered over a glare But everything is fair It’s a paradox we call reality So keepin it real will make you casualty of abnormal normality a) LL Cool J b) Jay Z c) Mos Def d) Talib Kweli
Talib Kweli
400
An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.8 shook _________ on April 25, killing more than 8,000 people, flattening sections of the city’s historic center and setting off avalanches around Mount Everest, where at least 18 climbers died.
What is Nepal?
400
Driven by fears that an aging population could jeopardize China’s economic ascent, the Communist Party leadership ended its decades-old “_________” policy in October.
What is One Child?
400
This update sees yet another term added to the ever-proliferating vocabulary of specialized diets: ______, derived from a blend of free and vegan, refers to ‘a person who eats discarded food, typically collected from the refuse of shops or restaurants, for ethical or ecological reasons’; it is also used as an adjective with reference to that practice.
What is freegan?
500
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee! I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.”
What is apostrophe?
500
"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift."
Bukowski
500
In a historic transformation of the American military, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said in early December that the Pentagon would open all combat jobs to _________.
What are women?
500
_________ mustered the faithful and impressed many in September during his first visit to the United States. At the White House, Congress and the United Nations, he also pleaded for environmental stewardship and compassion for immigrants and the poor.
Who is Pope Francis?
500
The word ________ has entered general English usage to refer to a makeshift method of overcoming or bypassing a problem, but until recently it was limited primarily to technical contexts. First attested in 1961, for its first two decades it was used primarily in aerospace jargon. For instance, in 1965, the Oakland Tribune reported that ‘Project Apollo executives are trying short-cuts, improvisations and ‘____-______s’ to keep the moon schedule from slipping out of the ’60s and into the ’70s’ (12 Sept.). By the 1980s, the term had also been adopted by the computing industry to refer to a method of overcoming a performance issue or limitation in a program. Adoption of the ________ in nontechnical contexts is a relatively recent development.
What is workaround?