pedal

«pedal» in Mova's school dictionary: A part you push with your foot to make a bike move — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 4 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a pedal, pedals); verb (pedal, pedals, pedalled/pedaled, pedalling/pedaling)

meaning for a pupil

1) A part you push with your foot to make a bike move. tree →

2) A part you press with your foot to control a machine, car or piano. tree →

3) (verb) To push the pedals of a bike to make it go. tree →

sense in the lessons

In everyday life and safety, cycling: pedal steadily, keep your feet on the pedals, wear a helmet. In science, pedals and gears are simple machines that turn your push into movement. In cars, the brake and accelerator are pedals. Phrases: «pedal hard», «back-pedal», «pedal bin», «brake pedal».

examples

• Push down on the pedals to make the bike go. tree →
• I pedalled up the hill. tree →
• The car has a brake pedal and a gas pedal. tree →
• Press the piano pedal to make the note last longer. tree →
• She pedalled as fast as she could. tree →
• Put the rubbish in the pedal bin. tree →
• My foot slipped off the pedal. tree →

note

UK spelling: pedalled, pedalling; US: pedaled, pedaling. Homophone: «peddle» (to sell things, often in a bad way). Back-pedal means change what you said.

In the corpora

• Pedals are not wheels: every one of them has 2 pedals.
• Stabilisers stop the bike tipping, so you never learn this steering, which is why balance bikes with no pedals teach children faster.
• Gears change how hard each turn of the pedals is.
• Change gears while pedalling gently.

Trees and pragmatics

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