中国网站品牌栏目（频道）
The following day brought news from Richmond to throw every thing else into the background.
My comments:
If you draw a picture with a piece of chalk on a blackboard, the blackboard is the background. The background is there, without which anything drawn won’t be distinguishable, but it is often ignored.
Hence, something that is said to be in the background is behind the main thing that we’re looking at, and is considered relatively unimportant because they are not notable (due, often, to the very fact that they go unnoticed).
In the above example, the news brought from Richmond the following day immediately became the center of everyone’s attention, thus throwing everything else into the background – making them unimportant by contrast.
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本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。
About the author:
Zhang Xin（张欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.
