(adv.) Backward against the mast; -- said of the sails when pressed by the wind.
(n.) An abacus.
Example Sentences:
(1) Sources said that when Mitchell toured the Commons tea rooms on Wednesday and Thursday, he was taken aback by the opposition to him staying put, despite Cameron's support.
(2) Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Our political leaders can’t bear to face the truth’: Camila Batmanghelidjh spoke to the Guardian’s Patrick Butler in July “So you can understand that I am taken aback by allegations which now present themselves, about which I knew nothing.” Kids Company, set up by the charismatic Batmanghelidjh in 1996, was known to have the firm support of David Cameron for its work on gang violence and disadvantaged children.
(3) "At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up."
(4) Everyone was taken aback by Harrison's generosity, not least Idle.
(5) In the summer of 2015, Corbyn himself was taken aback by the surge in support for his message.
(6) Gaskill, who had found the play abandoned on a shelf at the Royal Court and decided to stage it the moment he read it, was equally taken aback.
(7) The ferocity of the battle, once the results of the prime minister’s negotiations with his EU partners had been announced, has taken Downing Street aback.
(8) A father of four children in the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood in west Los Angeles, was taken aback when he accompanied his 12-year-old son on a camping trip with scouts.
(9) Still, I'm taken aback by the immediate and vocal lack of enthusiasm for Steve Jobs's new product.
(10) Mallett said he had rebuffed the offer, which had come four years too late as far as he was concerned, but when it was put to Lancaster before England’s dead rubber against Uruguay he was immediately taken aback.
(11) For a few days, we were all really taken aback.” On Thursday, Dixons reported that its Greek arm, Kotsovolos , was seeing big-ticket items fly off the shelves.
(12) Labour seized on the ministerial disarray over the policy.Yvette Cooper, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "The government's unfair attack on child benefit is now unravelling ... they have clearly been taken aback by the reaction of parents across the country."
(13) Although the player has developed a thick skin, not least while he agitated for a move away from Anfield, he has been taken aback by the level of criticism that has been flung his way – particularly online – over Euro 2016 and apparently feels he has been made a scapegoat for England’s shortcomings at the tournament.
(14) For his part, Chu admits he was taken aback by his entry to Washington life.
(15) On Monday night, Lib Dem MPs were taken aback by the strength of opposition to a deal with Labour from within the Labour parliamentary party.
(16) They also told me hospitals around Aleppo and Idlib have had Red Cross symbols removed because they are becoming a target for the Russians.” Taken aback by what he was told by the group of rescue workers, trainees known as the white helmets, he continued: “We in Britain have been rightly challenged about Saudi Arabia in Yemen and why we maintain our confidence in the Saudis not breaching international law.
(17) "I think they were taken aback by how quickly the region – in which they have invested a lot of time and energy and diplomacy, and a lot of human and monetary resources – turned against them," said Jakobson.
(18) The other half would not have been remotely taken aback.
(19) Welfare groups told the Senate community affairs committee they were taken aback by how “harsh” the budget was and believed it would be more balanced.
(20) He was taken aback to have his application for benefits turned down.
Abacus
Definition:
(n.) A table or tray strewn with sand, anciently used for drawing, calculating, etc.
(n.) A calculating table or frame; an instrument for performing arithmetical calculations by balls sliding on wires, or counters in grooves, the lowest line representing units, the second line, tens, etc. It is still employed in China.
(n.) The uppermost member or division of the capital of a column, immediately under the architrave. See Column.
(n.) A tablet, panel, or compartment in ornamented or mosaic work.
(n.) A board, tray, or table, divided into perforated compartments, for holding cups, bottles, or the like; a kind of cupboard, buffet, or sideboard.
Example Sentences:
(1) In Experiment 3, intermediate and upper-rank abacus experts performed a similar task to Experiment 1 under two instruction conditions.
(2) The results revealed that in the mental calculation condition, abacus experts showed a non-significant tendency towards greater interference in the left hand whereas the controls showed no hand difference.
(3) Instead it came to a knife-fight armed only with an abacus .
(4) The trypsin sensitivity expressed according to this index allowed the establishment of an abacus wherein several zones, A, B, C and D, define cell adhesion behaviour on different biomaterials.
(5) Paulson is alleged to have been allowed to stuff Abacus with mortgages doomed to default.
(6) All subjects had equivalent abacus performance ratings.
(7) Within nine months, more than 99% of the mortgages referenced by Abacus were in default, leaving Royal Bank of Scotland's Dutch subsidiary, ABN Amro, with an $840m bill as it had insured the derivative against failure.
(8) A task-demand variable was defined as a conjoint of mental arithmetic (3 min) and abacus arithmetic (30 min).
(9) In 2010, the firm was fined $550m by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US, and £17.5m by UK's Financial Services Authority over the Abacus sub-prime mortgage product and the activities of Fabrice Tourre, a London-based employee.
(10) In addition to offering simulation exercises for teaching purposes, this abacus provides the means for studying the instantaneous urodynamic situation (correspondences between cycle time points, symptoms, and effects of treatments) and determining the effect of various medicosocial events on the course of the bladder and sphincter dysfunction.
(11) Loss of function mutations in the abacus A (abaA) regulatory locus result in formation of aberrant conidiophores that fail to produce conidia.
(12) These data suggest that (1) learning experiences can affect the pattern of cerebral specialization through the change of approaches to perform cognitive tasks, and (2) the right hemisphere engages in mental calculation for the abacus experts whereas the left hemisphere contributes to mental calculation in ordinary people having no experience of abacus learning.
(13) Conidiophore morphogenesis requires regulatory interactions between the products of the stuA, bristle (brlA), and abacus (abaA) genes.
(14) The SEC's case against Goldman centres on a 2007 mortgage derivatives deal named Abacus, struck by Fabrice Tourre, a banker now based in London.
(15) In tissues treated directly with OsO4-pyroantimonate, antimonate reaction product was found chiefly in abacus bodies and secretory granules of the Golgi region and in secretory granules in the distal pole of the cell.
(16) Temperature shift experiments with an abaA14ts strain demonstrated that abaA+ function induced phialide formation by the aberrant abacus cells and was continuously required for maintenance of phialide function.
(17) All nutrient data were converted to bead units which were summed on an abacus until the meal requirements were met.
(18) The authors hope this abacus will be an attractive aide to the understanding of the complex function of the distal urinary tract.
(19) Only noise exposure tended to influence the performance of male students in abacus arithmetic.
(20) The results revealed that in the mental calculation condition, abacus experts showed greater interference effects on left hand tapping, whereas control subjects showed greater interference effects on right hand tapping (as compared to left hand).