Example sentences of "[was/were] [adv] [noun] [prep] [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | For the law applied to smugglers , and they were rarely men of property . |
| 2 | Dockers and warehousemen were trying to drown the fire with what were effectively thimble-fulls of water . |
| 3 | The ‘ friends ’ were mostly girls at work : she had to have those independently of Ken . |
| 4 | They were merely bits of paper . |
| 5 | His wrong-headedness resided in his failure to recognize that the attitudes and expenditures of which he made so much fun were merely symbols of achievement , the kind of achievement which has in fact given rise to every civilization and marked stages in the development of each one . |
| 6 | The theme running through Victorian Darwinistic science was that women were merely vehicles for reproduction and were thus nearer nature ( and the lower animals ) than men , but towards the end of the century a more positive view of motherhood emerged , largely as a result of eugenic concern about the quality of the race . |
| 7 | The larnaxes or burial chests were apparently imitations in clay of wooden chests . |
| 8 | ‘ We got our scores at crucial stages and it was always difficult for England when they were only level at half-time having played with the breeze . |
| 9 | ‘ We got our scores at crucial stages and it was always difficult for England when they were only level at half-time having played with the breeze . |
| 10 | It seemed to me that hardly any left the building in those weeks of May without murmuring apologetically that they were only leaving in order to get some baking done at home ! |
| 11 | Bland little symbols were only mirrors of colour and shape that she had to push around into the order her teachers wanted . |
| 12 | Aged residents were suddenly objects of pilgrimage from such far-off places as America , and soon there were few people over sixty who did not have some hastily dusted-down anecdote , remembered , borrowed or adjusted , ready for eager visitors . |
| 13 | The lowest officials on the administrative tier were the village headmen , who were normally men of substance . |
| 14 | The scale of the work varied but they were generally scenes from nature , the type of thing popularly believed to be the easiest to sell but not necessarily the easiest to paint . |
| 15 | Some of those who have , like the east European Mennonites , were not Germans by origin at all ( unless all speakers of Germanic languages are counted ) , but Flemings or Frisians . |
| 16 | In fact , they were not joints of meat at all , but pagan gods and goddesses , grotesquely and beautifully carved from roughly-cut haunches of woodland trees . |
| 17 | They were not ones for put-ring their hand to the plough then looking back . |
| 18 | The report of the committee enunciated that whereas tribunals were not courts of law , neither were they appendages of government departments . |
| 19 | Esher ( 1981 ) has suggested that Britain has experienced three ‘ Rebuilds ’ : the Enlightenment , the Industrial Revolution and the Welfare State : ‘ fashioned by wartime social democrats in England , which would for the first time in history build cities that were not dramatizations of privilege and poverty ’ ( p. 278 ) . |
| 20 | Margaret Hewitt has calculated that in Lancashire between 1861 and 1871 , the districts showing the highest proportion of young married women were not centres of cotton industries . |
| 21 | They were not respecters of party lines and the last two in particular were widely distrusted among parliamentary colleagues . |
| 22 | Traditional doughnuts were just lumps of dough with jam in the middle until , in 1847 , the Americans invented the ring doughnut . |
| 23 | Now obviously the you could see the cars in that fast lane there , they were just nose to tail , nose to tail . |
| 24 | They were just blobs of ink — but we made them think |
| 25 | At the same time as this threat Henry found himself faced with a revolt of a section of the Breton nobility , alarmed by his high-handed treatment of their duchy , and there were already hints of trouble elsewhere in his dominions . |
| 26 | Furthermore , these months were usually periods of synthesis and discovery . |
| 27 | Also on the surge , they were quickly face to face with Mallachy and Rory . |
| 28 | Its interests were imperial and its speakers were always men of distinction : members of the Cabinet , colonial Governors and the like . |
| 29 | He tells me that there were once herds of antelope , thousands strong , roaming these plains . |
| 30 | There were still splinters of glass gleaming on Maggie 's shoulders and high flat breasts . |