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Idiom: Hindsight is 20/20
A large number of students find the idiom hindsight is 20/20 challenging.
For one thing, they don’t know how to read the numbers, and for another, they don’t know what the numbers mean.
I think that quite a few native English speakers may not be able to explain the origin of the idiom either.
I’m getting ahead of myself here, so let me explain how to read the numbers: 20/20 is read as twenty-twenty.
The slash (/) is not pronounced.
Next, the meaning of the numbers and the origin of the idiom are the same.
They are a measure of a person’s ability to see something clearly.
20/20 (twenty-twenty) vision is better than an average person’s vision.
It means that you can see clearly from twenty feet away what you should be able to see clearly.
The numbers can change.
For example, if your vision is 20/70, you can see from 70 feet what people with 20/20 vision can see from 20 feet.
Your eyesight is not as good as theirs.
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Before I run out of space, I must talk about the idiom itself.
Hindsight is 20/20 means that when we look back at past events, we know everything about them.
Unfortunately, when we are experiencing an event live, we often don’t know what we should do; we make mistakes.
Other people will often tell us what they would have done in the same situation if they had been there.
However, hindsight is 20/20.
They now have information that we did not have at the time.
Although it’s frustrating, all we can do is learn from our experiences and remember that hindsight is 20/20.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.