Example sentences of "[adv] a very few " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | The capacity of a few — perhaps a very few — people to inflict extinction on us , will gradually extend to more and more small groups of human beings , all of whom are liable to exhibit the self-aggrandisement and irrationality which have led to so much unnecessary suffering in the history of our species . |
| 2 | Only a very few civil servants within the recipient government understand what the project is really about . |
| 3 | After only a very few years of teaching it becomes the twenty-first or the forty-ninth . |
| 4 | In only a very few pages , we have left the twentieth century far behind and discovered that these two descend from the Lombardic heroes mentioned in the Old English poem Widsith ( Aelfwin and Eadwin ) ; and since Aelfvin means ‘ Elf-friend ’ , we are not surprised to find ourselves drifting further back to the times when elves still walked the earth , before Numenor ( the Atlantis of the Tolkien mythology ) had sunk beneath the waves . |
| 5 | Only a very few raised a finger . ’ |
| 6 | These days , when she occasionally took over from Annunciata and brushed Mrs Browning 's hair , she marvelled that a woman so much older than herself should still have such black , black hair with only a very few silver threads in it ( which she was instructed to pull out ) . |
| 7 | Presumably , they learn chemistry , yet only a very few will be chemists when they grow up . |
| 8 | He 's taught many a Clubrep to ski and with only a very few exceptions , he can virtually guarantee to get you up and around the bay first time . |
| 9 | The route from gene to observed effect can be very tortuous and has been worked out in only a very few cases so far . |
| 10 | In the event there remained only a very few clients with a need for care beyond normal services . |
| 11 | Everything eaten turns to wind and they may feel full and distended after only a very few mouthfuls with momentary relief ( > ) from belching . |
| 12 | Only a very few of the many references in the bibliography are earlier than 1979 yet undergraduates are already arriving at university with first-hand experience of videotext and expect their lecturers to know more ! |
| 13 | Most who had previously suffered in this way reported a definite improvement and only a very few said they did suffer from constipation at first . |
| 14 | And still only a very few seem to want to leave . |
| 15 | The tank is unfiltered but contains only a very few fish at any one time . |
| 16 | Of those who have introduced a proportion of Cabernet , only a very few — Baron de Ley , Martinez-Bujanda and the much improved Marques de Riscal — have the courage to admit to it . |
| 17 | ‘ Only a very few failed and they must have been bloody awful . ’ |
| 18 | Births in a family which pre-date a marriage or follow it by only a very few months were increasingly common and apparently quite acceptable in the late 18th century ; here in Victorian London , however , the suspiciously early arrival of little Benjamin James ( on 11 December 1846 — rather less than nine months after the marriage ) was regarded , it seems , with a touch of disquiet . |
| 19 | Some people , but only a very few , endeavoured to thwart the lucrative customs of the funeral furnisher by specifically requesting a coffin of a type not expected of their situation . |
| 20 | It perhaps is a function of the early stage of interpreter development in the UK ( though there are only a very few positive indications that the situation is different in other more developed countries ) and one can expect a change of provision , attitude and therefore skill . |
| 21 | Here only a very few unusual men are retained in the public eye for prolonged periods . |
| 22 | Most of these conditions are extremely rare : only a very few are as frequent as one per cent . |
| 23 | However , only a very few were , and are , reputed to materialise substances . |
| 24 | Part-time workers who work only a very few hours do not benefit from many of the forms of employment protection introduced by legislation over the last decade or so , although those part-time workers who work at least half the usual hours are covered on some items . |
| 25 | Again , this was a 1960s fad which lasted only a very few years ( c 1966–69 ) , although split-screen sequences had occasionally appeared in fantasy films such as musicals in the 1940s and '50s . |
| 26 | Its distinguishing feature is that it uses only a very few basic operators — typically just one , called modus ponens , or some equivalent — which are very well understood and reliable . |
| 27 | However , it is not very useful for a bibliographic file in which there may be thousands of potential attributes for each record , only a very few of which are non-zero . |
| 28 | Continental and maritime Antarctica have no large year-round rivers , and only a very few smaller ones , mostly glacier-fed torrents , to match the smaller tundra rivers of the north . |
| 29 | Of hundreds recorded from the air , only a very few have been visited even briefly by sledging parties , and little is known of their biology . |
| 30 | For example , of the 60 or more species of copepods found in arctic plankton , some 50 are of Atlantic origin ; only a very few species penetrate from the Pacific , though some of those have been reported close to the Pole ( Brodsky , 1956 ) . |