shā​lǐ​táo​jīn

to pan for gold from sand

沙里淘金 沙裡淘金 shā​lǐ​táo​jīn
to pan for gold from sand
To extract gold from sand by washing it with water.
small returns for great effort
To get very little result despite spending a huge amount of time or energy.
to select the essence
To pick out the best parts from a large amount of material or to select the best from a mass of people or things

Frequency

Written text
0.051 per million

Cross-References

See

Sources

Frequency data
BCC Corpus (BLCU)