They are "apparently inactive, but poised for action if action is required". That is the pattern we found in our analysis of more than 23,000 stories from these six news sites from 2008 to 2012, a timespan that included two presidential elections and a midterm election, as well as two non-election years.
Vehicles and machines are poised for action.
The stage crew is poised for action.
Sir Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, also seems poised for action.
Our phones — and now tablets — are always on and poised for action.
"He also liked male figures poised for action, in this case the cowboys".
"We want to be poised for action, to be proactive and to respond as quickly as possible.
On a dressing table, bags of cocaine were scattered casually: a dusted mirror and credit card poised for action.
Anthony Allen, too, is very close, while a host of others nursing minor knocks are poised for action in the next few weeks.
The Russians, however, said this was merely a military exercise.Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst who accurately predicted Russia's war with Georgia in August, says that Russia's troops are still poised for action.
He went off by himself, on the morning of the event, and wrote a brief, evocative, highly personal tribute that compared Freud to "a bantam prize fighter in training — nippy, sinewy, always somehow poised for action".
