Would you know any synonyms for "a neighbourhood of" as used here:
The reactants in Test Tube C reached a neighbourhood of stability 40 seconds after they combined to form iron sulfide.
Thank you!
English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityWould you know any synonyms for "a neighbourhood of" as used here:
The reactants in Test Tube C reached a neighbourhood of stability 40 seconds after they combined to form iron sulfide.
Thank you!
in the vicinity of
His yearly salary is in the vicinity of one million dollars.
Example usages quoted from Merriam-Webster.
"The reactants in Test Tube C reached a neighbourhood of stability 40 seconds after they combined to form iron sulfide."
It's a very 'clunky' sentence. Even as a native speaker it took me a couple of seconds to 'decode' it.
Vicinity is a good synonym, but a much better way to write the sentence would be:
"The reactants in Test Tube C were close to achieving stability 40 seconds after they combined to form iron sulfide.
The nearest synonym of neighbourhood I can think of is locality.
Does that help?
Just as translating from one language to another does not always mean a literal exchange of words, it is not always possible to understand jargon - scientific or otherwise - by using a thesaurus. I don't think synonyms of 'neighbourhood' will make any sense.
'Stability' in some contexts does not have any gradations - something is either stable, or it is not. For example, you would not expect the foundations of a building to have much movement, if any at all, to be considered 'stable'. But other things have an operating range within which they can be said to be stable.
I think what your example is trying to say is that either a range of stability was reached (ie it was within normal parameters, but perhaps only just), that it gained a degree of stability (ie it was mostly stable), or perhaps that it was approaching and close to a normal range.