Virtual dead heat?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Virtual dead heat?

Why are preliminary rounds called “heats”, then? Plausibly, according to some, this expression is inspired from the furnace. When you want to forge a useful tool from a piece of raw iron, you put the iron into the furnace to heat it up, and then strike it while it’s red and hot, emanating lots of heat. You have to strike iron while it’s hot (another useful expression, cliché actually) because when it cools down it becomes less elastic and more inflexible.

And when the iron does cool down, you have to put it back in the furnace to heat it up again, hence the expression heats, meaning you have to do it several times over.

Anyways, dead heat has nothing to do with death or the heat wave. If you Google “dead heat”, as I did, you will see that translate.google.cn puts it into Chinese as 热死，which literally means “die by the heat.” That just shows how far off computers can be when it comes to getting ideas across from one culture to another.

Here are recent media examples of “dead heat”:

1. Public opposition to the new health care law has eased in the past month, enough to help level off Barack Obama’s falling popularity - but not to turn it around.

Fifty-five percent of Americans in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll disapprove of the president’s job performance overall, unchanged from last month’s reading as the worst of his career. Forty-three percent approve, a scant percentage point from 42 percent in November.