Vocabulary

Over the decades, these research trips have shed light on the basic biology and ecology of the bears and, in recent years, helped scientists keep tabs on how the animals are coping with climate change. The rapid habitat changes are already their behavior; with the sea ice retreating quickly, some of the bears now have…

Along the river, people biked, walked, roller-skated, bird-watched, caught up with friends. But I found myself most intrigued by the people who were fishing. In this unexpected environment of concrete, buzzing traffic and litter, the act of fishing seemed almost defiant: a/an outdoors activity against a backdrop of highway overpasses.

Welcome to our new weekly interactive Vocabulary in Context Quiz, created with help from Vocabulary.com. We will be publishing a new one every Thursday this school year, and you can find them all here. This week's quiz comes from a "burst" published on Jan. 24, 2022. Choose the word or phrase that BEST completes each…

In 2015, Jason Citron, a computer programmer, was struggling to break through in the video game industry. The new multiplayer game he had created with his development studio, Hammer & Chisel, was not catching on. So Mr. Citron engineered a/an about-face. He laid off his company’s game developers, turned the game’s chatting feature into its…

There are several reasons a person might come to own a large number of unusual pets. For instance, because they are passionate about animals. But also, because YouTube is passionate about animals — the more, the better. “A large number of pets is not my goal, but a large number of pets gets views on…

The 13-year-old, Milly Hardwick, said that she, her father and her grandfather had been out in a field with metal detectors for several hours on a Sunday in Royston, England, and had not found a single item. Then, just after a lunch of sandwiches and cookies, they tried a different part of the field, where…

“It wasn’t a helicopter. And it wasn’t an airplane. It was a _____ between the two, with a curved hull, two small wings, and eight spinning rotors lined up across its nose and tail.”Which one of these words — breakdown, chaos, cross or mix-up — best completes this sentence from a New York Times article…

Each window was inspired by children’s drawings of holiday dreams — of homes, beaches and games. “The style is sort of candy-coated imagination,” said Andrew Winton, the senior vice president of creative at Saks, who oversees the holiday displays. Mrs. Obama was there to promote a partnership between Saks and the Obama Foundation’s Girls Opportunity…

Here — in a side office, up the stairs of an unmarked building hidden away on a block of the city center jammed with flashy music stores that used thumping loudspeakers to attract customers — was the workshop of one of this city’s oldest and most accordion repairmen. “Everything I do is to improve the…

For women in conducting, there are reasons to be optimistic. Administrators at major ensembles in cities like Atlanta, Minneapolis and Cincinnati, as well as Baltimore, are vowing to ensure that women are serious contenders. Search committees are looking at a mix of artists and rising stars, according to interviews with 20 committee members, administrators, players…