Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Chan-Seung Lee]

[redset]

The text is saying that in all these situations, the vast majority of the results (80 percent) are produced by the minorty (20 percent) of the effort. (Twenty percent is one fifth, 80 percent is four fifths.) With the clothes example, if you have a small amount of clothes (20 percent of your wardrobe) that you wear most of the time (80 percent of the time), then the rest of your clothes - the majority of them, 80 percent (four fifths) - are hardly worn at all. It's almost as though you could give them away and it wouldn't matter, since you hardly wear them. You could say that 80 percent of your wardrobe is largely irrelevant - those clothes hardly affect what you look like, since you almost never wear them.

The same goes for the accidents - since (apparently) 80 percent of accidents are caused by 20 percent of motorists, the remaing 80 percent (four fifths) of motorists hardly cause any accidents at all, so when talking about the causes of accidents that 80 percent is much less relevant.

Largely irrelevant means mostly irrelevant, not completely irrelevant - the 80 percent of motorists still cause 20 percent of accidents, so they have some relevance, but nowhere near as much as the other group of motorists. They're not of great value, because they don't really contribute as much to the overall effect.

Does that make sense?