Yes, it means boring. I'm Australian and both are fairly common phrases here.

I live in a neighborhood called Florida (from the Spanish word for flowers) that is about 10 minutes away from downtown by bus. Along every block, there are a few flowers and there are different types of trees along the avenues. Some of the houses and buildings have a front yard gate. Compared with other neighborhoods, there are quite a few green spaces such as squares, green lanes and flower gardens, and people often like to decorate their houses with flower pots on their windowsills. Some like to plant trees like lemons or flowering bushes. As far as local amenities, we have three schools and at each school there is a soccer pitch and square nearby. Near my house, there is also a police station, a maternal health clinic and many churches. Sadly, my home is located near a pet food factory that occasionally boils bones to make pet food and sometimes it is disgusting because the smell of bones reaches my home. All my the neighbors complain about it. Moreover, I don't like it when people throw litter on the avenue as consequentially, stray and vagrant dogs come looking for food; scratching and tearing the plastic bags and it all starts to smell until the garbage truck collects it. But despite this, I like to live in this neighborhood because is not dangerous and people are peaceful and lively.

Sorry - I put the answer in the wrong place

It is correct and works fine. Just to Give you an alternative though, fantasy writing will often use a passive phrasing (and a sort of fake formal language) so for example ‘You are cursed forthwith! or speaking to the crowd - ‘She is hereby cursed!’

No. We would usually say my ‘least favourite’ or ‘one of my least favourite’.

It means that there are problems with the way this scientific study was done which means that the conclusions might be unreliable.

It means the end point of the data in the science study. The group only analysed data up to 2013 but other scientists have published about this since then (after 2013).

‘Shedding’ is used to describe hair or fibres which come off naturally from clothes, people and animals. Every time we wash or dry our clothes, little tiny bits of the clothes are released into the water and go down the drain. Synthetic clothes are made of a type of plastic and so when they are washed, little bits of plastic come off (are shed by) the clothes.