Example sentences of "[was/were] [adv] the first [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Calvinist Ghent in the 1570s , Paris under the domination of the Catholic League were perhaps the first sustained exercises in popular power in the modern period , and even they did not last long . |
| 2 | I may venture to add Jerry and I were probably the first Scottish kids to hear this coming over the air . |
| 3 | He was merely the first famous one . |
| 4 | The Commission 's action against Dennis Levine was perhaps the first major success . |
| 5 | We know that Champagne was not the first sparkling wine : references in the Bible like ‘ wine … when it moveth itself ’ ( Proverbs 23:31 ) and ‘ Neither do men put new wine into old bottles ; else the bottles break ’ ( Matthew 9:17 ) confirm the existence of sparkling wine long before viticulture was even introduced to the Champagne region . |
| 6 | It was not the first African paper , although nowadays some Tanzanians think that it was ; nevertheless it is the only one whose direct descendants are still in existence , and may be regarded as the first successful , viable paper ( that term has to be used in a relative sense ) edited and produced by Africans . |
| 7 | He was not the first black to play in a tournament sponsored by the American P.G.A . |
| 8 | The " Vouillé " campaign was not the first Frankish invasion of Visigothic Aquitaine . |
| 9 | Though it was not the first hostile bid — Charles Clore and Isaac Wolfson beat it by several years — the aluminium battle was a prototype for future bids in which a buyer made an offer to the shareholders of a listed firm against the wishes of its managers . |
| 10 | Bush was not the first senior industry figure to be left dumbstruck by the single-minded approach Kylie and her advisers were taking . |
| 11 | Laura was not the first English designer with a puritanical streak . |
| 12 | Eadric Streona 's raid on St David 's in 1012 was not the first English incursion of Æthelred 's reign , and Cnut had been opposed by Welsh allies of Edmund Ironside in 1016 , and felt it necessary to settle several Scandinavian earls in the west midlands , one of whom , Eglaf , ravaged Dyfed in 1022 ; it is Welsh , not English , sources which record his flight from England after Cnut 's death . |
| 13 | Nicholas was not the first Scottish star who has made the error of moving to London in the belief that the terraces are paved with gold . |
| 14 | There had been an English career Consul in Madeira since 1658 ( although this was not the first foreign consulate ) , and by 1680 there were ten English wine-shippers in the island . |
| 15 | The BBC was not the first public corporation and by no means the last . |
| 16 | It was not the first British Empire . |
| 17 | This was not the first false alarm designed to draw the police into an ambush , although no one had been ambushed so far . |
| 18 | Details of the Soviet initiative were kept secret but reports in the German newspaper Bild ( Chancellor Helmut Kohl was noticeably the first foreign leader to be told about the proposal ) and elsewhere revealed its outline . |
| 19 | HBcAg was usually the first viral antigen to be detected by immunohistochemistry ( Fig 1B ) . |
| 20 | Although this represented no more than 4–5 per cent of their combined nuclear arsenals , it was nonetheless the first significant agreement of this kind between the two powers since the ABM treaty of 1972 , and was held by both sides to presage the conclusion of an agreement the following year which would make cuts of up to 50 per cent in strategic nuclear arms . |
| 21 | But he was hardly the first good-looking man she 'd had dinner with . |
| 22 | Only a day after reporting the second year of falling personal computer sales ( CI No 2,157 ) , the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association says that Japanese manufacturers ' shipments of personal computers jumped 6.2% in unit terms during the January to March quarter from a year earlier , and the rise in combined exports and domestic sales to 688,000 units from 648,000 units in the year-earlier quarter marked the first quarterly rise in two years ; exports rocketed 31% to 144,000 units but domestic shipments only inched up 1.1% to 544,000 units , but was still the first quarterly increase in two-and-a-half years ; because of the price wars , combined export and domestic shipments of made-in-Japan micros — when measured in currency terms , fell 8.3% — exports and home sales each off 8% . |
| 23 | He outlined the long connections of the New River Head site back to early in the 17th century when what was probably the first privatised water company was established by James I ( VI of Scotland ) . |
| 24 | He was probably the first deaf man in the world to do so . |
| 25 | This was probably the first successful application of the crank to a steam engine in order to produce rotary motion . |
| 26 | The untreated , untrimmed , unadorned sheepskin was probably the first human garment and may therefore have been associated in the Minoan mind with the distant and primeval past . |
| 27 | ) . Their biggest hit was called ‘ But I Love Sergeyevitch ! ’ which was probably the first pop song to treat Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev in a friendly if rather frivolous manner . |
| 28 | It was also the first major examination in Britain of the whole nuclear controversy . |
| 29 | So if one picks fourth-wall busting as the decisive criterion , the first big sitcom was also the first postmodern sitcom . |
| 30 | In 1859 missionaries published Nigeria 's first paper , which was also the first African paper in an African language . |