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calcaneous
Joined: 23 Feb 2006
Posts: 32
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 Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 11:42 pm Post subject: Such figures are too vast an abstraction. |
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Hi, guys.
I saw this sentence from my English dictionary,
but it doesn't make any sense to me.
My question is:
1. Is this grammatically correct? (shouldn't it be
abstractions, not an abstraction?)
2. what does this mean, exactly? |
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CP
Joined: 12 Jun 2006
Posts: 2875
Location: California
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| Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 2:03 pm Post subject: |
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Such figures (large numbers, probably) are too abstract for most people to grasp. When you find out how far away other galaxies are, and how many of them -- billions and billions of them, to quote Carl Sagan -- you can't even comprehend it. When a million is a thousand times a thousand, and a billion is a thousand times a million, the numbers become too abstract to understand in any real sense.
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You live a new life for every new language you speak. -Czech proverb |
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