1) pretty much
almost; almost completely几乎;差不多
出处:What Steve didn't know-but I did- was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right.
仿写:One cat looks pretty much like another to me.
2) hold on to
To keep sth; to not lose sth 把...留下来;不失去
出处:Decades of research had shown that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory, which is the type of memory the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time.
仿写:Hold on to this wonderful book as long as you like.
3) running into a wall
Accidentally crash into a wall, 撞墙,引申为“碰壁”to experience difficulties or problems.
出处:I was reading the digits at a rate of one per second-too fast for him to transfer the digits into his long-term memory-so it was no surprise that he was running into a wall at numbers that were about eight or nine digits long.
仿写:The task got out of my control and ran into a wall.
4) set out to
To begin to do sth with a particular aim or purpose (胸怀目标)开始工作,展开任务
出处:So in collaboration with Bill Chase, a well-known Carnegie Mellon psychology professor, I set out to redo the old Martin and Fernberger study...
仿写:After moving to Guanzhou, Lucy set out to improve her oral English.
5) as typical a +n+as, 在......方面和......一样
出处:The subject we had recruited was Steve Faloon, who was about as typical a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate as we could have hoped to find.
仿写:Michael is as typical a boy as the one you just mentioned.