Job Discussion Forums

[hereinbeijing]

What is the meaning of "played an important role" in the following sentence?
Iran's Elections Reported on Twitter:The service played an important role in informing the outside world but it may have had little influence in the country.

I would define role as part. Can you think of a better way of defining role?

[BigWally]

"to play a role" is exactly what you think it is, it means "to play a part"

For example:

Chein-Ming Wang played an important role in the New York Yankees winning the last game of the series.

The idea here is that had the Yankees not had the services of Wang, they probably would not have been successful.


So in your example:

Iran's Elections Reported on Twitter:The service played an important role in informing the outside world but it may have had little influence in the country.

From this statement, we can see that if Twitter didn't exist, many of the people in the world outside of Iran wouldn't have heard about the recent uprisings.


Hope this helps.

[El Chupacabra]

This is not a question of grammar, but of semantics.