mode

The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.

The Articles of Confederation was the first constitution of the United States. Created by the Continental Congress in 1777 it featured a loose confederation or union of sovereign states. In contrast to Britain’s Parliament, the Articles strictly limited the power of the national government. Despite this weakness the United States successfully won the Revolutionary War under the Articles. In 1787 a Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and created our present plan of government, the U.S. Constitution which then replaced the Articles.

Originally published as "On the Duty of Disobedience" and based on an 1848 lecture, Thoreau's work is a civil libertarian classic. Questioning the authority of all governments, Thoreau especially challenges both the right of the state to tax him and the morality of a government that allows slavery. Read the full text here.