What's the difference between contraption and precarious?

Contraption


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) My new contraption simulated smoking, I learned, through a battery which heated and vaporised liquid nicotine in water and propylene glycol.
  • (2) Anja Vestergaard brings out the robot and I come foot-to-wheel with the contraption that is supposedly revolutionising Denmark's care for the elderly.
  • (3) The bike is hideous, a vast contraption with an illuminated panel that flashes your heart-rate at you.
  • (4) Over the last few years, at the kinds of conferences where the world's technological elite gathers to mainline caffeine and determine the course of history, Google has entertained the crowds with a contraption it calls Liquid Galaxy .
  • (5) He tried to capture its character – which he described as a “diabolical contraption, a dusty hunk of electric and mechanical hardware that reminded me of the disturbing 1950’s Quatermass science fiction television series” – in a near-lifesize two metre by three metre Portrait of a Dead Witch, which he also intended as a joke about the contemporary craze for computer-generated art.
  • (6) In the build-up to the Broncos game, Tomsula made Okoye take on blockers inside this contraption.
  • (7) British artist Matt Hope has designed a “breathing bicycle” , a home-made Heath Robinson-style contraption that filters air as you pedal along and feeds it through a tube into a fighter-pilot breathing mask.
  • (8) Originally released as an unfinished beta version, players had to wade through software bugs and mechanical uncertainties, using the game's complex crafting system to build homes and contraptions, but having to share information on what worked where – there was no tutorial.
  • (9) You can see the bite marks.” Clapper sits me down at a conference table with some chocolate biscuits and begins puffing on a black contraption with a window through which I can see a yellow-brown liquid sloshing.
  • (10) The device the doctor held in his hand was not a contraption you expect to find in a rural hospital near the banks of the Nile.
  • (11) Known as bathing machines, and looking like beach huts on wheels, these contraptions became a ubiquitous feature of the Victorian seaside, helping to protect the modesty of generations of our forebears until it became socially acceptable to walk across the beach in a bathing costume.
  • (12) Photograph: Robert Goddyn Architecture Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age From the glamorous glazed living rooms of Californian Case Study houses, perched precipitously above the twinkling lights of 1950s LA, to the rusting contraptions of the German industrial belt, this expansive survey of architectural photography will show a broad cross-section of images from the 1930s to the present day.
  • (13) Looking further afield, both in distance and eccentricity, the Malaysian entries include an invention to make cows more conspicuous at night and a complex gadget that finds the end of a roll of adhesive tape, while Adam Ben-Dror of New Zealand offers a contraption that allows bored or lonely goldfish "to roam freely on land" inside a tank with wheels.
  • (14) We see the moment Reese volunteers to save John Connor’s mother – and his future kind-of girlfriend – and then he gets blasted back to 1984 in a massive, and I mean massive , blue time-travel light-beam contraption.
  • (15) In a best-case scenario, the contraption should be operational by Monday.
  • (16) As a vision of the imminent future, it might strike a chill into Europhobic hearts: a German contraption measuring 140 metres (460ft) in length, designed to drive into the very core of the City within months.
  • (17) Culture A bunch of Mayan villagers are hanging out in the jungle, improbably hunting big game with a zany Indiana Jones-style contraption that looks like a giant sideways meat tenderiser.
  • (18) Over the next few days cranes will attempt to lower the 100-tonne contraption around 5,000ft (1,500 metres) to the sea floor and position it over a leaking pipe that has been gushing 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf.
  • (19) He didn’t succeed, but one of his contraptions did develop into the heart-lung machine so crucial for open-heart surgery.
  • (20) But after the first 10 shots he hit me to the body, covered in this bullet‑proof contraption, I walked away and laughed from deep within my stomach – without noise.

Precarious


Definition:

  • (a.) Depending on the will or pleasure of another; held by courtesy; liable to be changed or lost at the pleasure of another; as, precarious privileges.
  • (a.) Held by a doubtful tenure; depending on unknown causes or events; exposed to constant risk; not to be depended on for certainty or stability; uncertain; as, a precarious state of health; precarious fortunes.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This case demonstrates that the manifestations may be delayed and that urgent surgical intervention may be lifesaving despite the precarious status of these patients.
  • (2) Enlargement to include poorer states such as Armenia, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan would make the balance of the EEU even more precarious.
  • (3) Matthew Taylor was appointed by Theresa May last October to review employment practices in the light of concerns about the precarious nature of work, particularly in the gig economy.
  • (4) The diagnosis has usually been made only at autopsy, and early surgical intervention has often been withheld because of the patient's precarious hematological status.
  • (5) Rather than experiencing a slowdown in its frenetic building sector, however, Kabul is increasingly overrun with precarious apartment blocks.
  • (6) One suggestion is to abandon the scheme in London and south-east England but continue it in the north and Midlands, where market conditions are less precarious.
  • (7) What’s left for such workers is the same as their blue-collar counterparts: lower wages, precarious work and a lot of borrowing.
  • (8) After more than a quarter of a century of camping out, the house, with its seven flights of stairs (a trial to Lessing in her final years), seemed almost to be supported by a precarious interior scaffolding of piles of books and shelves.
  • (9) Some of these are functions that would once have been taken on through squatting – and sometimes still are, as at Open House , a social centre recently and precariously opened in London's Elephant & Castle, an area torn apart by rampant gentrification, where estates are flogged off to developers with zero commitment to public housing and the aforementioned "shopping village" is located in a derelict estate.
  • (10) But I think that can be repaired.” Although Senate Republican leaders have been more willing to rally behind Trump, their members find themselves in a decidedly precarious position.
  • (11) The financial markets are keenly aware of Britain's precarious position.
  • (12) Not infrequently the only unilateral care overlooks important aspects, which are precarious for the course of the disease.
  • (13) The predilection of rectal stricture and its proposed precursor, salmonella ulcerative proctitis, for the middle third of the rectum was attributed to a normally precarious arterial supply which renders the rectum unusually susceptible to ischemic injury and decreases its reparative capacity.
  • (14) Despite public homage to the knowledge economy, this new regime seems designed to make the careers of the next generation of academics as precarious and unrewarding as possible.
  • (15) The precarious position of small schools is due to the loss of the local funding formula, and with it local democratic control.
  • (16) Buses drop workers on the roads and they make the precarious walk through the dark to their homes.
  • (17) When compared with classification by number of diseased vessels and by arteriographic score of Friesinger, the nonprecarious cases had better prognoses than the precarious.
  • (18) When people say it doesn’t matter who you vote for, in this election, in this seat, in this city, it really will.” Becca, who has spent the past two years in poorly paid and precarious part-time jobs, is one of 12 people recruited for the last of five focus groups organised by qualitative polling firm BritainThinks, working in partnership with the Guardian, to examine five key battleground seats and the larger political themes that will help decide the election.
  • (19) The AIDS situation highlights the precarious balance between individual rights and the public welfare, patients' rights, and the rights of nurses and their professional obligations.
  • (20) According to new research from the University of Exeter, women at the top of the ladder are being promoted into risky and precarious leadership positions where the chance of failure is high.