| 释义 |
ˈhard-pan orig. U.S.
[See pan.]
1. A firm subsoil of clayey, sandy, or gravelly detritus; also, hard unbroken ground.
1817T. Dwight Trav. New Eng. (1821) I. 374 What is here called hard pan, a very stiff loam, so closely combined, as wholly to prevent the water from passing through it. 1828Webster, Pan, among farmers, the hard stratum of earth that lies below the soil; called the hard pan. 1829H. Murray N. Amer. II. iii. i. 273 The farmer comes to what Mr. Spafford calls hard-pan, a stiff impenetrable surface on which no vegetable substance will grow. 1883Century Mag. Nov. 113 The New [World] is for the most part yet raw, undigested hard-pan. 1886Marquis of Lorne in Gd. Words 166 Large quantities of loose rock and hardpan. 1963D. W. & E. E. Humphries tr. Termier's Erosion & Sedimentation 406 Hardpan, an English agricultural term (used mainly in the U.S.A., Africa and Australia) for a horizon in podsolic and lateritic soils hardened by precipitation and cementation. 1968New Scientist 10 Oct. 79/3 The number of rice paddies under cultivation in some Far Eastern countries could be doubled using an asphalt ‘hardpan’.
2. fig. Lowest level or foundation; bottom; ‘bed-rock’.
1852W. B. Pike in N. Hawthorne & Wife (1885) I. 444 Almost all the novel-writers I have read, although truthful to nature, go through only some of the strata; but you are the only one who breaks through the hard-pan. 1860Holmes Elsie V. viii, Mr. Silas Peckham had gone a little deeper than he meant, and come upon the ‘hard-pan’, as the well-diggers call it, of the Colonel's character. 1872B. Talbot in Amer. Ann. Deaf July 135 Down in the very hard-pan of ignorance..must the workman prepare a bed for this foundation. 1883H. A. Beers in Century Mag. June 285/2 But it [a book] didn't appear to get down to hard-pan or to take a firm grip on life.
3. attrib. and Comb.
1870J. K. Medbery Men & Myst. Wall St. 212 Hard pan is soon reached, and both old world and new are full of hard-pan capitalists. 1889K. Munroe Golden Days xi. 122 To tell the honest hard-pan truth. 1907R. W. Service Songs of Sourdough (1908) 77 When a man gits on his uppers in a hard-pan sort of town. 1928Bull. Amer. Soil Survey Assoc. IX. 33 Immaturely developed soils may have a hardpan-like horizon. |