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give my right arm

[ 2014-01-26 16:38] 来源:中国日报网     字号 [] [] []  
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give my right armI would give my right arm to know about it.

My comments:

If we guess correctly, your right hand is your good hand, i.e. the strong hand or the stronger hand in comparison with the left.

Kidding. To give an arm, left or right, is just a way of saying you’re ready to give, sacrifice a lot in order to gain something. In this case, the speaker wants to give his/her right arm to gain knowledge about it, whatever “it” is.

One foreigner who used to teach in Beijing once told me of the hospitality he received from all around when he first came here in the late 1980s:

“The Chinese are always ready to help. If you ask them for a finger, they’ll give you six legs, two of them their own, the other four borrowed from the village.”

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

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.

 
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