this sentence is from Longman dictionary, I wonder which part of the roads were blocked, is it part from inside city to other place(such as suburb, or another city ), does the sentence also implicate the roads inside city were not blocked by snow?
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2 Answers
It seems to me that you have a grasp on what the meaning of the sentence is but you are trying to infer details that are unclear given the example sentence.
All the roads out of the city were snowbound.
We do not specifically know which parts of the roads are blocked, only that they are blocked.
To me this does imply (without certainty) that the roads inside the city are not snowbound. If the roads inside the city and the roads leading out of the city were snowbound, "All roads were snowbound." would be the more natural sentence.
The sentence is
All the roads out of the city were snowbound.
The site seems to have an interactive feature.
It says
snowbound (adjective)
blocked or prevented from leaving a place by large amounts of snow
So all together, the sentence means
Trying to exit the city was not possible because all the roads that are used to exit the city were blocked by large amounts of snow.
Your sentence does not particularly imply much about the roads inside the city. Because these particular roads are snowbound, it suggest that it was snowing heavily. So, it might suggest that other roads were snowbound. But we don't know if it was just snowing in that particular area, or throughout the city, or what.
Since these are roads that lead out of the city, they are in still within the city. So on your way to the next city-- or wherever this road leads-- it is blocked within the limits of the city.
