For High School Graduates
Noun
ability to make good judgments and quick decisions
Dhoni epitomizes the aspirations of millions of young cricketers in India today. He has shown that apart from having the talent he also has the cricketing acumen to be successful.
Adjective
accompanied by good fortune
"Once every 12 years, when the stars, the planets, the moon and everything is in proper alignment, it is considered the most auspicious and divine and sacred time to have a bath in the confluence of these sacred waters."
Verb
disguise the true nature of something
Stapelia Grandiflora, the Starfish Flower, is attractive in appearance, but its looks belie the horrid stench it emits to attract insects.
Adjective
causing harm or damage
Families' mortgages are often now worth more than their homes, which has some pretty deleterious effects on the housing market.
Adjective
scarcely perceptible
Jordan Belson's films have been called painterly and cosmological. Both words are apt, with his intimations of organic and molecular forms having an evanescent beauty.
Verb
delay or prevent the passage of legislation
Jon Stewart excoriated Republicans for filibustering a measure giving health benefits to first responders who worked at ground zero after Sept. 11, 2001.
Phrase
have your true identity kept secret
go incognito
Once in a while it's nice to change things up and go incognito -- like this poodle who is undergoing a Halloween transformation in Tokyo.
Once in a while it's nice to change things up and go incognito -- like this poodle who is undergoing a Halloween transformation in Tokyo.
Adjective
made up of the same kind of people or things
Former Japanese prime minister Taro Aso's tourism minister had to resign after calling Japan an "ethnically homogeneous" country that did not like foreigners.
Noun
large-scale public systems and services of a country or region
infrastructure
Europe is investing in its infrastructure, and the results are breathtaking. Through the English Channel tunnel, trains can speed from Big Ben to the Eiffel Tower in 2.5 hours.
Europe is investing in its infrastructure, and the results are breathtaking. Through the English Channel tunnel, trains can speed from Big Ben to the Eiffel Tower in 2.5 hours.
Noun
something that seems purposely contrary to what one expects and is amusing as a result
The IRS is rewarding a whistle-blower $4.5 million for turning in his employer, which netted the IRS $20 million in taxes. One bit of irony: he has to pay taxes on the reward.
Adjective
relating to motion
In the Westfield Stratford City Mall in London, tiles produced by Pavegen Systems are designed to collect the kinetic energy created by the estimated 40 million pedestrians who will use that walkway in a year.
There is general freedom in the classroom.
The phrase laissez-faire is French and literally means "let [them] do", but it broadly implies "let it be," "let them do as they will," or "leave it alone."
Noun
vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
Despite the embracing of new, hip words and phrases, the editors of the OED openly admit they are not always enthusiastic users of the new lexicon.
Adjective
extremely sad or gloomy
Edward Wilson is recruited in the 1930s and dispatched to London to learn espionage from the Brits, led by Michael Gambon's lugubrious spymaster. Meanwhile, his new pregnant wife is left to fret in Washington.
Noun
complete or marked change in appearance or circumstances
The Metamorphosis is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family and a quintessentially alienated man.
Noun
branch of engineering that deals with things smaller than 100 nanometers
Dealing with things smaller than 100 nanometers (a human hair is 80,000 nm wide), nanotechnologies are poised to revolutionize medicine.
Noun
process by which carbon dioxide and water are converted into carbohydrates by green plants
Plant's photosynthesis machinery is tuned to absorb red and blue light most efficiently. In the future, plant factories will probably be "pinkhouses," glowing magenta from the mix of blue and red LEDs.
Verb
use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own
Benjamin attends a writing workshop to show off his work but his idea, Yeast Lords - The Bronco Years, is plagiarized by the legendary fantasy novelist Ronald Chevalier.
Noun
fourth state of matter distinct from solid or liquid or gas
The Large Hadron Collider is producing an exotic material called quark-gluon plasma, a substance denser than a neutron star.
Adjective
dangerously high or steep
The Bay of the Descending Dragon is scattered with some 3,000 precipitous, strangely sculpted limestone islands that are dotted with small floating villages.
Adjective
cheerfully optimistic
Sanguine professionals possess a flair for the dramatics. They exude enthusiasm and are valuable for their ability to come up with novel ideas.
Verb
bring under control
Writers' rooms are, according to Mr. Martin, viciously competitive, as teams of television's finest writers struggle to subjugate their talents to the greater vision of the shows' sometimes autocratic creators.
Noun
needless saying of the same thing twice in different words
Whoever came up with the term 'action sports' should get some kind of trophy gong prize from the Global World Tautology Foundation. Is there a sport that does not involve action?
Noun
science of identifying and classifying species
Could crowdsourced photo sharing be the future of taxonomy? More and more people are using high-quality cameras that capture the kind of detail scientists need for identification, and they are sharing their photos online.
Adjective
characterized by violent behavior
Tempestuous winds battered Japan as Typhoon Roke moved northeast up the coast, passing over the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Prefecture.
Noun
converting one form of energy to another such as effect on temp. and work
For the Kakapo, heaviest species of parrot, the accretion of thermodynamic efficiency comes at the expense of flight ability.
Verb
take over or use wrongfully
Our appetite for salt is programmed into our brains. Now scientists believe that cocaine and heroin are particularly addictive in part because they usurp that programming.
Verb
separate one part from another, usually the good from the bad
Pu’u Mahana, a gem of a beach in Hawaii, has olive-green sand, due to the olivine crystals winnowed from the eroding headland by the action of the sea.
Noun
tower consisting of a number of stories with outside staircases
Book Mountain, a ziggurat of bookshelves that spirals upward underneath a pyramidal glass enclosure. Unfolded, the construction consists of 480 meters of terraces with a bookshelf surface area of 9,300 square meters.