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English Idiom: Learn the ropes
We need to learn the ropes whenever we start a new job; I’m sure you know what I mean.
Each company has its own way of doing things.
We may already know the gist of the job, but we still need to learn how the company works, what its office politics are, how to do the particular job that we were hired to do, etc.
It takes a while to learn the ropes, but usually, someone who already knows will show us the way.
For experienced people, learning the ropes at a new company is not hard.
Learn the ropes means to learn how to do a job.
If you know the ropes, you know how to do the job; if you show someone the ropes, you show them how to do a particular job.
It comes from sailors working on sailing ships in days gone by.
Sailing ships have many ropes, and new sailors had to learn what each rope controlled.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is simple and easy to read.
It’s likely to be understood by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 85.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.