Example sentences of "[v-ing] away at the [noun pl] " in BNC.

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1 Carl is banging away at the drums ,
2 In an air attack on the way back he had been killed while firing away at the fighters who were strafing his truck .
3 That rap is snapping away at the threads that bind the hypocrisy of society is now an acknowledged fact .
4 ‘ Stan , ’ said Lydia , abstractedly , pulling away at the feathers of the pheasant and strewing them about her .
5 Meanwhile , however , the rich followed their king 's dictum ‘ Après moi , le déluge ’ , and gave themselves up to pleasure — balls , the opera ( where new works by Gluck , Grétry and Piccinni were finally displacing the heroic works of Lully and Rameau , beloved of the Ancien Régime ) , gambling and hunting ; the chattering middle classes were busy discussing politics and aesthetics ; writers such as Voltaire and Diderot were chipping away at the foundations of society with their radical ideas of universal fraternity in this ‘ Age of Enlightenment ’ ; and the poor were being told to ‘ eat cake ’ , if they had no bread .
6 He was like a gold miner , chipping away at the rocks and occasionally discovering tantalizing little nuggets that spurred him on towards his dream of striking a rich seam .
7 Dave did n't bother to shave until the evenings , and Colin 's shoes had been coming away at the sides for weeks .
8 ‘ The idea was n't greeted with much enthusiasm at first , ’ he says , ‘ But we continued plugging away at the distillers and mounted a back-selling campaign to the airline industry , pointing out what a boon light-weight ‘ Melinar ’ containers would be to them for their in-flight miniatures and duty-free supplies .
9 But just as the microprocessor and open software standards are gnawing away at the foundations of the mainframe market , so massively parallel machines are beginning to chip away at the monolithic vector machines — once the parallel software catches up with the hardware .
10 Emmie imagined the beetles busy in the roof , gnawing away at the rafters .
11 In five attacks he emptied every bullet in the drum , battering away at the vitals : the engine , cockpit , fuel tank .
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