Daily Content Archive
(as of Friday, September 29, 2023)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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compunction
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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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 Turkish CoffeeTurkish coffee is prepared in a special pot called a cezve and is made from finely ground coffee, cold water, and sometimes sugar. In Turkey, sugar content is determined based on a ranking system that includes 4 levels of sweetness. The coffee is served in small fincan similar to Italian espresso cups, and its sludgy grounds settle in a thick layer at the bottom. Often, a finished cup is turned upside down on a saucer and the patterns left by the grounds are examined for what? 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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 Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) | |
| 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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 State Fair of Texas (2024)Not surprisingly, the State Fair of Texas is one of the nation's biggest state fairs, claiming more than three million visitors to the 200-acre Fair Park in Dallas. The fair began in 1887, and in 1952 Big Tex, its symbol of bigness, arrived. Big Tex is a 52-foot-tall cowboy with a 30-foot chest and 7'8" biceps, wearing a five-foot-high, 75-gallon cowboy hat. The cowboy stands in the middle of the fairgrounds booming out welcomes and announcements. Among fair events are a college football game, concerts, and parades. 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... | |