Do you know the verb narrow ? Do not confuse it with arrow , which means “arrow”. Narrow has the meaning of “narrowing”, “tightening”, “restricting”. Whenever I hear this verb, I think of a funnel, which starts off wide and narrows.
The phrasal verb narrow down follows this same direction. In this post, we will see phrases with it meaning “reduce” and “limit”, such as the choice of candidates or items on a list.
Read the sentences below and if you have any questions, you already know that you can leave them in the comments that we help you with. Then add narrow down to your Anki , so you don’t forget that phrasal verb anymore .
1 – First, see narrow down meaning “reduce”:
We’re working to narrow down the list of possible suspects.
We are working to narrow the list of possible suspects.
We narrowed the list of candidates down from ten to three.
We reduced the candidate list from ten to three.
I’ve managed to narrow the list down to twenty-three.
I managed to reduce the list to twenty-three.
We’ve narrowed down our list of candidates to just three, but it’s going to be impossible to choose from them.
We have reduced our list of candidates to just three, but it will be impossible to choose between them.
After narrowing down a list of people, Vancouver Police said they pursued some leads and eventually identified him as a suspect.
After reducing the list of people, Vancouver police said they followed some leads and finally identified him as a suspect.
We narrowed down the list to four questions that asked about road design, road maintenance, buses and light rail.
We narrowed the list down to four questions, which asked about road design, road maintenance, buses and electric trains. (Read the article What is the difference between Street and Road? )
2 – Now, see narrow down meaning “limit”:
This will help you narrow down the projects you want to tackle first.
This will help you to limit the projects you want to deal with first.
We can narrow the choice down to green or red.
We can limit the choice between green or red.
We narrowed down the choice to only you or Paul.
We limit the choice to just you or Paul.
We have narrowed down the list to four candidates.
We limited the list to four candidates.
What happened is that the new results narrow down the possibilities.
What happened is that the new results limited the possibilities.
Let’s narrow it down to just our very top choices, otherwise we’ll never pick a place to go.
We will limit this to only our first choices, otherwise, we will never choose a place to go.
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