1) pretty much

almost; almost completely几乎；差不多

出处：What Steve didn't know-but I did- was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right.

仿写：One cat looks pretty much like another to me.

2) hold on to

To keep sth; to not lose sth 把...留下来；不失去

出处：Decades of research had shown that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory, which is the type of memory the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time.

仿写：Hold on to this wonderful book as long as you like.

3) running into a wall

Accidentally crash into a wall, 撞墙，引申为“碰壁”to experience difficulties or problems.

出处：I was reading the digits at a rate of one per second-too fast for him to transfer the digits into his long-term memory-so it was no surprise that he was running into a wall at numbers that were about eight or nine digits long.

仿写：The task got out of my control and ran into a wall.

4) set out to

To begin to do sth with a particular aim or purpose (胸怀目标)开始工作，展开任务

出处：So in collaboration with Bill Chase, a well-known Carnegie Mellon psychology professor, I set out to redo the old Martin and Fernberger study...

仿写：After moving to Guanzhou, Lucy set out to improve her oral English.

5) as typical a +n+as, 在......方面和......一样

出处：The subject we had recruited was Steve Faloon, who was about as typical a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate as we could have hoped to find.

仿写：Michael is as typical a boy as the one you just mentioned.