Does your professor(He is not my professor but a professor from a very famous university in China, and the big paper dictionary was edited by him and some other aids.) present this sentence as a quotation which accompanies a definitition.(There isn't an English definition, but a Chinese translation following the sentence. Imagine that, Five, my dear friend, you look up a term in a dictionary, then you can see the definition and sentence rather than the definition of the whole sentence, am I right?) If so, which word is he defining?(tang) Or is it an encylopaedic dictionary with the sentence as information about a person? (Just a common Chinese-English dictionary)
I think that if you want confirmation (or rejection) of your thoughts, we'll neeed to see the whole dictionary entry.(No need at all, you've helped me a lot)