Vocabulary Building Blocks: (5 Down) tropical (ADJECTIVE) 1. Of weather or climate; hot and humid as in the tropics. 2. Characterized by or of the nature of a trope or tropes or metaphor; changed from its literal sense. Similar: figurative, nonliteral. (Trope is language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense. Synonyms for trope include: figure of speech, image.) 3. Relating to, or situated in, or characteristic of, the tropics (the region on either side of the equator; between the tropics of Cancer and Capicorn). Similar: equatorial.

Did You Know? (27 Across) A Disk Operating System, commonly referred to as DOS is a generic term applied to any computer operating system that is loaded from a disk, as distinguishable from operating systems that supported tape. MS-DOS, or Microsoft Disk Operating System, is the single-user system developed for personal computers by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The Windows operating systems began extending the capabilities of MS-DOS in Microsoft computers beginning in 1985 and went through many versions until totally replacing MS-DOS with Windows XP in 2001. (Note: Microsoft, MS-DOS, Windows, and Windows XP are registered trademarks.