Example sentences of "[conj] [was/were] the " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Whilst he was chasing girls ( or were the girls chasing him ? ) and always looking for an easy pound or two , I was deeply concerned by the deteriorating political situation . |
| 2 | Happy coincidence , or were the magnets responsible ? |
| 3 | Or were the remaining hostages to be hanged ? |
| 4 | French poets , in the eleventh century , discovered or invented , or were the first to express , that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth . |
| 5 | Or were the knives sent to a random group of people to confuse the hunt for either the killer or the hoaxer ? |
| 6 | Or were the acts which produced this end so far away from them in time that somehow the temporal distance anaesthetised reality ? |
| 7 | Was that a collective decision by the Tory party or the Cabinet to raise false expectations or were the Ministers acting in a freelance capacity ? |
| 8 | Was truancy a symptom of wider emotional problems , or were the schools failing to provide education appropriate to these young people 's needs and interests ? |
| 9 | Does , does it call into question the fact that that was really what the peasants did think and believe , or were the peasants opportunists , and if they felt they could get away with anything they would get away with anything ? |
| 10 | Was he still handcuffed or were the handcuffs off ? |
| 11 | Can you tell me something about the crowd itself , erm did particular age groups tend to stand together around the ground or were the young |
| 12 | Did the postwar development of the welfare state remould capitalism to give it a more human face , or were the changes largely cosmetic ? |
| 13 | And you probably wondered what was on fire or were the spaceship had landed . |
| 14 | Where , oh where was the Lily of yesterday ? |
| 15 | Did you have a salty meal the day before that caused you to retain water , or was the last meal of the day unusually late ? |
| 16 | Or was the drawing unrelated to his feelings for Eugenie ? |
| 17 | Earlier in his decision , however , he had posed the question , ‘ was the child 's life going to be so demonstrably awful that it should be condemned to die ; or was the kind of life so imponderable that it would be wrong to condemn her to die ? ’ |
| 18 | Or was the whole episode simply an occasion for our own informed superior merriment ? |
| 19 | Or was the fact of their friendship with Gideon just an unwelcome coincidence , as I had at first supposed . |
| 20 | Was Baal truly sovereign or was the Lord ? |
| 21 | Was it because in some way he blamed Francis for his mother 's death — or was the reason less dramatic ? |
| 22 | These types of problem extend even to the more commonplace types of metalwork in which the lack of replication might lead to the suggestion that everyday items were produced locally as required ; but were such technical skills possessed by someone on every farm or hamlet , at only a few locations , or was the craftsman a mobile specialist ? |
| 23 | Or was the colonial thrust resented and opposed ? |
| 24 | Very much the Front Page look today , I thought , or was the hangover worse than usual ? |
| 25 | Or was the 1980 result merely a personal victory for Reagan ? |
| 26 | Was the child allowed to express a wide and deep range of emotion , or was the expression of particular feelings taboo ? |
| 27 | Or was the change a more superficial one in which a crude , but no longer viable , form of isolation was replaced by a more subtle variant , in which the techniques of the West were adopted to preserve and strengthen an essentially unchanged sense of cultural uniqueness and social order , and ensure survival in an unpredictable and hostile world ? |
| 28 | Or was the lancelet-shape the more ancient pattern from which animals like sea squirts developed by sticking their heads to rocks , losing their muscles and retreating into as undemanding a life-style as the seas can provide ? |
| 29 | Or was the way they engaged with these theoretical explanations of racism governed by the same conditions as applied to their reading of the ‘ primary ’ material ? |
| 30 | Does the sustained militancy of the Russian working class reveal the ‘ law-governed ’ essence of capitalist development and the inevitability of its overthrow , or was the Russian case an aberration , a unique deviant from the norm represented by western Europe ? |