What's the difference between brink and precipice?

Brink


Definition:

  • (n.) The edge, margin, or border of a steep place, as of a precipice; a bank or edge, as of a river or pit; a verge; a border; as, the brink of a chasm. Also Fig.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Video games specialist Game was teetering on the brink of collapse on Friday after a rescue deal put forward by private equity firm OpCapita appeared to have been given the cold shoulder by lenders who are owed more than £100m.
  • (2) And now here we all were, gathered together at Maine Road, on the brink of relegation.
  • (3) The orchestrated round of warnings from the Obama administration did not impress a coterie of senior Republicans who were similarly paraded on the talk shows, blaming the White House for having brought the country to the brink of yet another "manufactured crisis".
  • (4) Academisation and a school system on the brink | Letters Read more Perry Beeches has been a favourite of Cameron, as well as former education secretary Michael Gove and his successor Nicky Morgan .
  • (5) Data interpretation confirms the well-known thesis that reproductive health protection is not only of a medical and biological but of very wide interdisciplinary interest when the woman is on the brink of the important for her personally and finally for the society as well decision pro and con real pregnancy.
  • (6) The negotiations in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 were on the brink of agreement but failed because time ran out, with Clinton just out of office, and Ehud Barak facing almost certain electoral defeat to Ariel Sharon.
  • (7) Standing on the brink of a new decade, Texas physicians have a lot to look forward to.
  • (8) The Brinks Mat gang, some with guns, surprised six security staff as they started the Saturday shift between 6.30am and 8.15am at the warehouse, on the Heathrow industrial estate at Hounslow.
  • (9) Slowing growth, financial fragility, governments teetering on the brink of insolvency and default, and clear signs of a public backlash against the excesses of the rich and powerful: all have created a sombre backdrop to the invitation-only affair.
  • (10) But even if Greece is snatched from the brink of bankruptcy and kept in the euro in the coming days, the cause of promoting solidarity between eurozone nations has been long forgotten.
  • (11) He offerered some hope – "just as mankind had the power to push the world to the brink so, too, do we have the power to bring it back into balance" but not enough for one woman, who concluded: "He sure needs a hug."
  • (12) Not bad for a company which was on the brink of disaster when Jobs returned to it after a 12-year absence in 1997.
  • (13) Reader was previously jailed for a total of nine years for conspiracy to handle stolen goods and dishonestly handling cash, after the £26m robbery at the Brink’s-Mat warehouse near Heathrow airport in 1983.
  • (14) UK unemployment has tumbled to its lowest level since 2008, when the fall of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers brought the global economy to the brink of collapse.
  • (15) And the timing was unfortunate – just as the last round of US-brokered peace talks was on the brink of collapse – even though the project had begun long before.
  • (16) This week a ComRes poll for ITV News focusing on Labour’s 40 Scottish seats found that the SNP had a six-point lead, putting Sturgeon’s party on the brink of winning about 28 new seats and close to becoming the third largest party at Westminster.
  • (17) It seems they want to push us to the brink of Grexit [a Greek exit from the euro], squeeze us to our last drop of blood and breath, in the hope that they can get a little bit more out of us.
  • (18) "In Russia, there is a drastic gap between rich and poor, to the extent that I feel the country is on the brink of civil war.
  • (19) The junior doctors and their employers are heading back to the brink : the first all-out 24-hour strike in a generation is now threatened for next Tuesday, with a 48-hour strike planned for a fortnight later, and a third one in February, if the two sides cannot reach agreement on new contracts.
  • (20) But 10 years of rising prosperity, a health service brought back from the brink, and social norms around women's and minority rights transformed, have not come about by accident.

Precipice


Definition:

  • (n.) A sudden or headlong fall.
  • (n.) A headlong steep; a very steep, perpendicular, or overhanging place; an abrupt declivity; a cliff.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) On Sunday Assange said: "Will it [the US] return to and reaffirm the revolutionary values it was founded on, or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world?"
  • (2) In a day of unremitting gloom, and yet more market turbulence, the Greek government also stood on the precipice of collapse, risking an uncontrolled default, as the government of George Papandreou faced a late-night confidence vote in parliament.
  • (3) They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."
  • (4) "We may not be looking over the precipice as we were last autumn, but what we are likely to see is a long, slow reduction in the standard of living in this country.
  • (5) If parties want to try – and I believe they do want to move to a de-escalation – I think there are sets of choices that are available,” he said, expressing hope that “we can seize this moment and pull back from the precipice”.
  • (6) In a canyon between grey shattered precipices of bomb-ravaged buildings, an uncountable number of people wait for food.
  • (7) Filled with classic British gangster-movie iconography – hard London faces hung upside-down from meathooks, the stock-car pile-up – The Long Good Friday is also a grownup, despairing look at Britain on the edge of an economic and political precipice.
  • (8) Peg Johnston, the owner, finds herself facing this precipice every year.
  • (9) However, while a government shutdown is off the table, the spectre of the kind of political brinkmanship that took the US to the precipice of an economic crisis in October has not been entirely averted.
  • (10) As its population ages, China is racing toward a “demographic precipice,” says Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine.
  • (11) "But it's at a precipice where it needs to jump to the next level of evolution."
  • (12) There is a palpable feeling in the country that the ruling junta has run out of ground, teetering on the precipice and threatening to take the country with it.
  • (13) But by voting, First Nations can return their communities from the precipice.
  • (14) For Abbott, on the precipice of fulfilling his destiny in politics, it would have seemed like collegiality, not outright soul-selling, to become a man for Peta and for Brian down in party headquarters, a man for the colleagues, a man for the Liberal party base, a man for Rupert and for Alan Jones and for Ray Hadley (when Scott Morrison wasn’t available) – a man who would validate the various irrationalisms of the wireless ranters and the white male columnists in Rupert’s employ – young and older fogeys who cherish past certainties, and who feel just as ambivalent about the future as Abbott himself feels.
  • (15) IFS inequality chart IFS warns of biggest squeeze on pay for 70 years over Brexit Read more “These troubling forecasts show millions of families across the country are teetering on a precipice, with 400,000 pensioners and over one million more children likely to fall into poverty and suffer the very real and awful consequences that brings if things do not change.
  • (16) With the NFL’s first openly gay player about to join the workplace environment, the League stands on the precipice of a new era, where a culture of respect won’t just be promoted, but will be strictly enforced.
  • (17) More generally, relations with the US and Europe spiralled, with the values gap ever bigger and the rhetoric on both sides ever more spiky, while still refraining from going entirely over the precipice.
  • (18) The prospect of protracted political instability has stoked fears that Greece is not just teetering on a political precipice but also laying the ground, however unwittingly, for its own euro exit.
  • (19) This time, people saw they were at the edge of a precipice and they reacted.” He said of his absolute majority in parliament elections this week , that cemented the collapse of the decades-old traditional French parties, as well as being seen abroad as holding back populism: “My election, and my majority in parliament are not the end of something: they are a challenging beginning.
  • (20) Since neither the men nor the animals could be sure of their footing on account of the snow, any who stepped wide of the path or stumbled, overbalanced and fell down the precipices.” At length they reached a spot where the path suddenly seemed impassable, as Livy describes it: “A narrow cliff falling away so sheer that even a light-armed soldier could hardly have got down it by feeling his way and clinging to such bushes and stumps as presented themselves.” “The track was too narrow for the elephants or even the pack animals to pass,” writes Polybius.

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