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To overburden someone is to give them more work, worry, or problems than they can honestly carry. You can overburden a person (a nurse with too many patients), a team, a school, or a whole system, such as a hospital or a court. It sounds a little formal and a little heavy, which fits: a burden is a load you have to carry. People also use it as a noun in this same sense: the overburden of extra work. Though actually, in mining, overburden is also the dirt and rock sitting on top of the coal or metal you want — a different picture, same idea of a load on top. In everyday English you will almost always hear the “too much work” sense.
使負擔過重；負荷過重
組成over- (too much) + burden (a load you have to carry). From over- + burden.
同家族的字
- burdena heavy load of work, worry, or duty
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
overburdenverb/ˌəʊ̯vəˈbɜːdn̩/
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To overload or overtax.
- In reality, the levels of work varied: some internationals seemed overburdened with tasks and responsibility, some seemed underburdened, and some faced apparently just the right amount of work.
- He said the increase would avoid overburdening taxpayers who have subsidised the railways by £31 billion since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic.
overburdennoun/ˈəʊ̯vəˌbɜːdn̩/
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geographygeologynatural-sciencesThe rock and subsoil that lies above a mineral deposit such as a coal seam, or any other underground feature.
- Before much progress was made with the inverts, however, the movement became accelerated, and it was decided to lighten the load over the tunnel by removing some of the soil, […]. This reduction in the overburden arrested the movement, and the inverting and centring were completed, and the tunnel opened again to traffic on April 9, 1949.
- Such rocks have been changed by baking in a terrestrial pressure-cooker. Then they have been disinterred: kilometres of overburden must have been removed.
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archaeologyhistoryhuman-sciencesA sterile stratum that lies above the stratum being investigated.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。