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Phrase: Hit the jackpot
Recently one person hit the largest jackpot in American lottery history.
The winning ticket was sold at Joe’s Service Centre in Altadena, California, and the store owner received a one million dollar bonus for selling the ticket.
The store owner hit the jackpot, but do you know how much the winner got?
They got an eye-watering $2,040,000,000 US (two billion forty million).
That is￥286,303,800,000 (two hundred and eighty-six billion, three hundred and three million, eight hundred thousand).
The definition of hit the jackpot is to have tremendous or unexpected success, especially when you make a lot of money very quickly.
What would you do if you won that much money?
You would need to tell no one and attain the best financial counselling available.
This is a life-changing amount of money not just for the winner but perhaps their entire family, possibly for generations.
However, the average lottery winner winds up bankrupt within five years of hitting the jackpot.
You would have to quit your job because managing that money would now be your main full-time occupation.
Now, you know what hitting the jackpot means, but where does the term come from?
Well, hitting the jackpot comes from gambling by playing poker.
A jackpot was the pile of money in poker that accumulated until someone produced a pair of jacks to win it all.
It’s common to call the cash available to be won the pot.
I don’t know where ‘pot’ comes from, but perhaps you need a pot to carry the money to the bank.
I don’t know.
However, I think the person who hit the jackpot in California needs a big pot.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 66.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.