Example sentences of "[prep] only a few [num] " in BNC.

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1 It is often complained of by many that a meeting will take five minutes to agree the expenditure of ten million and two hours to debate a minor item worth only a few thousand .
2 We had run for only a few hundred yards .
3 Blue whales are no longer hunted , but their numbers were depleted to such an extent in the past that present populations ( perhaps of only a few hundred individuals ) may be too small to recover .
4 But mistaken loan decisions or pricing policies swiftly come home to roost in an organisation with a balance sheet of only a few hundred million .
5 Today , the kestrel , if not endangered , is certainly one of the world 's rarest birds of prey , with a population of only a few hundred .
6 Its bases around the Bay were staffed by a total of only a few hundred men .
7 Although the finding of typical , oval , thin-shelled strongyle eggs on faecal examination may be a useful aid to diagnosis , it is important to remember that substantial worm burdens may be associated with faecal egg counts of only a few hundred epg , due either to low fecundity of adult worms or to the presence of many immature parasites .
8 Mr Murphy says eligibility levels which took account of variations between households and actual , rather than assumed , figures for tax and housing , could be definitively assessed by further analysis of detailed Family Expenditure Survey statistics at the cost of only a few thousand pounds .
9 The centre of the Sun is at a temperature of fifteen million degrees and at a density 150 times that of water ; in Richter 's experiment , the density of the gases would be a mere fraction of water density and the spark that was supposed to ignite the thermonuclear explosion would have a temperature of only a few thousand degrees .
10 Within a dozen years Philadelphia , its capital , was among the half-dozen largest English towns in North America and , although it had a population of only a few thousand people , very few towns in England apart from London were much larger .
11 By a quirk of nature , many large-volume rhyolite systems harbour exceptional melt Rb/Sr ratios ( in the range 100–1000 ) and consequently experience rapid changes in Sr-isotope composition as radioactive 87 Rb decays to 87 Sr. With routine measurements of Sr-isotope ratios possible to a precision of a few tens of parts per million , time differences of only a few thousand years between crystallization and eruption ages become detectable .
12 Laboratory studies have been made up to about 10 6 bars , at which pressures molecular hydrogen is still liquid even at 170 K. However , such pressures are encountered at depths of only a few 1000 km below the clouds , and therefore theoretical studies have to be used to obtain the phase-diagram at greater pressures .
13 Then , with only a few hundred yards separating them now from their foes , they set off seawards .
14 It can hardly be coincidental that these remarkable evolutionary events , taking place within only a few million years , correspond so closely in time with an episode of exceptional igneous and urogenic activity ( Larsen & Pitman , 1972 ) , the rapid disintegration of Pangaea ( Hallam , 1980 ) and the biggest marine transgression since the mid-Palaeozoic , apparently produced either by a phase of accelerated sea-floor spreading or by a dramatic increase in the length of the ocean ridge system .
15 When the weather is showery , there is always a grave risk of the cloud base lowering to only a few hundred feet , and this can happen within minutes of the rain starting to fall .
16 Although , in terms of volume or profitability , such discoveries can not hope to make up for the fading glory of the state 's North Slope field , daily Alaskan production might fall by only a few hundred thousand barrels over the next decade , rather than dwindling away , as some had suggested .
17 Orwell felt that the bulk of British public opinion was behind Chamberlain 's foreign policy of ‘ non-intervention ’ , dissension being voiced by only a few thousand left-wingers , some of whom went on to fight in Spain .
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