Daily Content Archive
(as of Tuesday, September 29, 2020)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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fisticuffs
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Forming the Third ConditionalThird conditionals are used to establish a hypothetical situation in the past, followed by a hypothetical outcome that did not really happen—typically, the outcome is the opposite of what actually happened. How do we form the third conditional? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 OrcPoet and artist William Blake is known for the complex mythology he created in his Prophetic Books. Among the characters that take shape in these writings is Orc, a positive figure symbolizing rebellion, passion, freedom, and revolution. He stands opposed to Urizen, a figure of order and tradition. Through characters such as these Blake analyzes the American and French revolutions, which took place during his lifetime. Orc's life, which ends in rebirth, bears parallels to what religious figures? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 CERN Is Founded (1954)Abbreviated as CERN after the original French name, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. CERN's activities are sponsored by 20 European countries. It was there that the World Wide Web—developed to promote scientific collaboration by facilitating information sharing—was invented in the 1990s. CERN's latest project, the Large Hadron Collider, is, among other things, being used to discover the hypothesized Higgs boson, which is what? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 László Bíró (1899)Frustrated by the way his fountain pen's sharp tip would tear paper and by the amount of time he wasted filling the pen with ink and cleaning up smudges, László Bíró set to work developing a better pen. A Hungarian newspaper editor, he noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly and without smudging, but it was too viscous for use with existing pens. With the help of his brother, a chemist, he developed the modern ballpoint pen. How long did it take him to build his pen? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 We drink one another's health and spoil our own.Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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the lion's den— A particularly dangerous, hostile, or oppressive place or situation, especially due to an angry or sinister person or group of people within it. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Election of the Lord Mayor of London (2022)Since 1546, Michaelmas has been the day on which the Lord Mayor of London is elected each year. Two candidates are chosen from among the city aldermen who have already served a term of office as sheriff. The ceremony begins when the current Lord Mayor, two sheriffs, and 26 aldermen walk from the Mansion House to Guildhall. The candidates proceed to the Aldermen's Court, a body of 13 aldermen whose job it is to select the mayor. Once the voting is over, an ornate horse-drawn coach carries the new mayor to the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor's official residence since 1753. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: intensityheat - As a preliminary race for a sporting contest, it is so called because of its intensity. More... crescendo - Often mistakenly used to mean "reaching a pinnacle" when, in fact, it should be used only to describe a gradual increase in intensity or volume. More... resonate, resound - Resonate means "to expand, to intensity, or amplify the sound of," whereas resound means "to throw back, repeat the sound of." More... fervency, fervor - The intensity of heat or feeling can be described as fervency, from Latin fervere, "boil"; an instance of this heat or feeling is fervor. More... | |