0 heavy matter such as sand or stone that is used at the bottom of a ship or a hot-air balloon to make it heavier, or the small stones on which railways and roads are made -- （船的）压舱物；（气球的）镇重物；（用作路基的）道砟，石碴
Like ballast, the dead weight of your loss balances, restrains, holds you to measured meter.
The north masonry facade of the causeway, capped by a parapet, was significantly more formal than the southern edge of the causeway, where the ballast feathered out.
In this, the theory goes, the condition and effectiveness of party organisations and underlying intellectual trends play a far bigger role than any historical ballast.
Suppose a surveyor is surveying a 2000 tonne cargo ship and discovers that ballast water is being stored in a fuel oil tank.
However, since there was no wharf, jetty or landing beach, ballast from wrecked vessels would most likely have been dumped in seawater.
She also took in a few tons of graphite as ballast after having unloaded her main cargo.
Furthermore, the fluorescent sources had conventional magnetic ballasts and therefore were subject to luminous flicker, whereas incandescent lamps do not flicker.
The way the authors deal with difficult material is not to break it up so that readers can make sense of it, but to weigh it down with academic ballast.
