砸(zá) - to smash, to pound, to hit with something heavy; to flop, to fail in Mandarin

砸 (zá) is to bring something heavy down on something else: a stone on a lock, a hammer on a nail, a brick falling from a balcony. The weight is the whole point, which is what marks it off from 打, a general hit, and 敲, a knock.

It very often takes a result complement rather than standing alone. 砸开 is to smash open, 砸破 is to smash and break, 砸坏 is to smash and ruin, 砸死 is to crush to death. Learning the verb without one of these tails leaves you with half a sentence.

The colloquial second sense catches people out. 砸了 on its own means the thing was a disaster: 考试砸了, 生意砸了, 演出砸了. Here it is intransitive and nobody is smashing anything, so read it as flopped rather than looking for an object.