Everything I've wanted to know about electronics...but was afraid to ask!

[bandersen]

No, a 100K does not pull to ground more than 1K.

What we are referring to is a point in a circuit that has no DC path to ground.
Think of a grid in a triode tube. It is no physically connecting to anything inside the tube. If we coupled a signal to it through a DC blocking capacitor, the voltage would wander around with respect to ground as charge built up with nowhere to go except slosh back through the capacitor.

That's no good we want a fix DC bias on the grid to set the gain.
A simple way to do that is use a resistor to ground.

A common way of describing that is the resistor "pulls" it to ground.
We could just as well say sets or fixes the bias voltage.