downhill

«downhill» in Mova's school dictionary: going down a slope towards the bottom of a hill — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

adverb (downhill); adjective (downhill: a downhill path); noun (downhill, a skiing race)

meaning for a pupil

1) Downhill means going down a slope towards the bottom of a hill. tree →

2) A downhill path or road slopes down. tree →

3) Going downhill can mean getting worse, like a game going downhill after a mistake. tree →

4) It's all downhill from here can mean the hard part is over and it will be easy now. tree →

sense in the lessons

In safety lessons: going downhill on a bike or scooter makes you go faster, so use your brakes gently and early; never ride downhill into a road. In science, things roll downhill because of gravity; water flows downhill. In sport, downhill skiing is a fast race down a mountain. Phrases: «go downhill», «run downhill», «downhill all the way», «downhill skiing».

examples

• We raced downhill on our bikes. tree →
• Brake gently when you're riding downhill. tree →
• Water always flows downhill. tree →
• The ball rolled downhill into the pond. tree →
• The walk back was easy because it was downhill. tree →
• Things went downhill after we lost the first match. tree →
• It's all downhill from here. tree →
• She won the downhill ski race. tree →
• But as he did so it began to roll very gently downhill. tree →

note

One word. Opposite: «uphill». Note: «go downhill» about a situation means getting worse, but «it's all downhill from here» can mean either getting easier or getting worse; the context tells you which.

In the corpora

• A story passed from person to person is like a snowball rolling downhill: it picks up bits on the way.
• Think of pouring a bucket of water on a sandpit: little channels join into bigger ones and run downhill to one place.
• The deadliest danger is a pyroclastic flow, an avalanche of hot gas, ash and rock racing downhill at over 100 km/h.
• A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its own weight.
• Aqueducts carried fresh water from hills to cities, sometimes over high stone bridges, using a gentle downhill slope.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «downhill» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.