这个短语的字面解释是“一桶里的一滴”，这是什么意思呢？请看对话：

    A: I heard your team was given a huge bonus for last year’s sales.

    B: Half a million dollars sounds huge, but what we were paid for our work was a drop in the bucket compared to what the company earned.

    Note: This idiom refers to a very small proportion of the whole. It originated in the Bible, Isaiah 40:15 (King James Version): “Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.” It precedes a related idiom, “a drop in the ocean,” which means the same thing, and was first found in a piece from The Edinburgh Weekly Journal, July 1802.