Piece of Cake

Welcome to English in a minute.

Do you find American idioms hard to understand?

It’s our goal to make learning them “a piece of cake”.

Everyone in America knows this idiom because it’s so easy.

Hey! How did you do on the exam?

I got an A.

The exam was a piece of cake.

In American English, when you say something is a “piece of cake”, it means it is very easy to do.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries,

Africa Americans started “cake walks”.

They walked or danced around a cake in pairs, and the best couple won the cake.

This is how the idioms “cake walk” and “piece of cake” came about ; both meaning that something is very easy to do.