Daily Content Archive
(as of Tuesday, March 29, 2016)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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perquisite
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Possessive DeterminersPossessive determiners, also known as possessive adjectives, are a class of determiners that are used to modify nouns to denote possession. We use a different possessive determiner to correspond with each personal pronoun. What are the main possessive determiners in English? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 SumerThe Sumerian civilization was the world's earliest civilization, developing at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in lower Mesopotamia in about 3500 BCE. The Sumerians had a well-organized communal life and were adept at building canals and irrigation systems. Unfortunately, the evaporation of irrigated waters led to increased soil salinity and greatly reduced agricultural yields, weakening the predominantly agricultural civilization. What form of writing did the Sumerians invent? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Gustav III of Sweden Dies of Infected Gunshot Wound (1792)Gustav III was King of Sweden from 1771 to 1792. Having inherited a weakened Swedish throne, he established a new constitution that increased the crown's power. His numerous enlightened reforms antagonized the nobility, and when a group of Swedish officers mutinied during his unpopular war on Russia, he reinstated absolute monarchy. Gustav planned to form a league of European monarchs to oppose the French Revolution, but Swedish nobles had him assassinated. Where was Gustav when he was shot? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Ernst Jünger (1895)Early in his career, Jünger, a German writer and WWI veteran, published novels based on his army experience. Strongly influenced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, they glorified war and its sacrifice as the greatest physical and mental stimulants. He later opposed Hitler and rejected his own militarism, expressing instead a desire for peace in his wartime diaries and in futuristic novels like On the Marble Cliffs, an allegorical attack on Nazism. What is Jünger's best known work? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others.Henry Fielding (1707-1754) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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breathe easily— To relax. To be free from worry. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Borrowed Days (2019)According to an old Scottish rhyme, the last three days in March were "borrowed" from April, in return for which March promised to destroy three young sheep. Other references go back even further. Both an ancient calendar of the Church of Rome and a 1548 book known as The Complaynt of Scotland allude to the days at the end of March as being more like winter than spring. Whatever their origin, it seems likely that the wet, windy weather that so often comes at the end of March gave rise to the notion that this month had to "borrow" some additional time. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: lightningnimbostratus cloud - Can drop precipitation but has no lightning or thunder. More... artillery - A poetic term for thunder and lightning. More... coup de foudre - A sudden unforeseen event or instantaneous and overwhelming passion, such as love at first sight; it is French, literally, "stroke of lightning." More... lightning - Etymologically, lightning is simply something that illuminates or "lightens" the sky, a contraction of the earlier "lightening." More... | |