Original sentence: A root metaphor is the underlying personal attachments that shape an individual's understanding of a situation.An individual's political affiliations are another root metaphor that may affect the message conveyed by such terms as conservatism and liberal.In the example: "He is a very conservative politician", "conservatism" is the vehicle, "he" is the tenor and the attributes conveyed are dependent on the root metaphor: is it a good or a bad thing to be considered conservative.It is different to the previous types of metaphor in that it is not an explicit device in language but merely a part of comprehension.Religion is considered the most common root metaphor since birth, marriage, death and other life experiences can convey a very different meaning to different people based on their level or type of religious adherence
Edited sentence: A root metaphor is one which is basic or pervasive in human thought.Almost everyone uses physical elevation in their understanding and discussion of abstract quantities, using the equivalent of "up" to mean "more", and "down" to mean "less" regardless of their culture or native language.Example: "the price went up".Like many root metaphors, this one is exploited in mathematics, for example in the ordinate of the cartesian coordinate system.The vehicle, "up", is a basic component of most concrete human experiences, and the tenor (here, "price", but more generally quantity) is a basic yet abstract