Example sentences of "only a few [adj] [noun] " in BNC.

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1 Only a few rural areas , isolated by bad roads and non-existent railways , remained relatively untouched , but even these , by virtue of their isolation , were often gobbled up by the equally voracious demand for holiday homes and weekend cottages .
2 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 .
3 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 .
4 The man , pictured in yesterday 's Sunday Mirror wearing a thick black false beard , also claims he was paid only a few thousand pounds from the massive haul and is now broke .
5 The Witt Librarian John Sunderland rejects the idea of charging a fee for consulting the archive on the grounds that it would raise only a few thousand pounds .
6 There are only a few thousand maleos left , most of them in the northern parts of the island .
7 Here a great mass of molten rock , lying only a few thousand feet down in the earth 's crust , heats the rocks on the surface .
8 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 .
9 Firing visually into the dense grey packs moving across their front on the slopes opposite , only a few thousand yards off , gunners can seldom have had so superb a target .
10 Morton 's controversial final chapter is only a few thousand words long and attempts to sum up the marriage now but TODAY has discovered new revelations showing how close Diana came to walking out — and still might .
11 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 .
12 This affected only a few thousand people , however , and on June 9 there were protests over the restrictions by Israeli employers whose businesses were threatened , forcing the authorities to lower the age limit to 25 and drop the 10-employee rule .
13 Already , though , such a study of a community involving , perhaps , only a few thousand people brings in many elements , variables and causal links .
14 One possibility therefore was that the Earth is only a few thousand years old , a second theory is that ancient helium-3 trapped inside the Earth is being ejected by volcanic eruptions and the third idea , Palmer 's , was that the Earth is indeed billions of years old and that fusion is taking place even now .
15 By contrast , the legends concerning Atlantis and the others refer to a period of time only a few thousand years ago .
16 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 .
17 As the pressures mounted , Lenin was forced to admit that ‘ an unskilled labourer or a cook can not immediately get on with the job of state administration ’ and that only a few thousand workers throughout Russia had any experience of work in government .
18 However , analysis of genotype-phenotype association is possible in only a few frequent mutations ; the majority of the mutations are rare .
19 Danvers , Massachusetts-based PictureTel Corp is cutting prices on its M-8000 bridge product family : it says it will offer a fully H.320 version of its M-8000 Multipoint Bridge starting at $45,000 for the M-8600 with three ports : the M-8600 is for customers with only a few videoconferencing systems and limited requirements for linking a large number of sites on the same call ; the H.320 standards-compliant version will ship in the autumn .
20 Despite numerous studies published on the incidence and mortality of pancreatitis in various hospitals , only a few epidemiological studies on large populations have been carried out .
21 There have been only a few empirical studies of the relationship between volume and maturity .
22 This ammonite has only a few strong ribs , with a number of small tubercles in addition .
23 There is now nowhere on earth which is immune from man-made changes in the atmosphere or radioactive fall-out ; only a few remaining places where no humans have trod ; and in our own islands , only a handful of inaccessible sites which have escaped some deliberate interference with their ecology .
24 Close — the pupil sees the choice as between only a few alternative possibilities .
25 The Dunbars have observed only a few such fights to completion but the outcome is quite remarkable .
26 But only a few rare species are known to produce the toxic trichothecenes .
27 ‘ A company where only a few outside interests own the shares .
28 Only a few simple cartridges are available , including Tennis , Baseball and Super Mario Land .
29 It is not a very demanding version of the chase , especially on Sundays , when you may well see rows of gunmen in position only a few easy yards from the hotel where they mean to have lunch .
30 The interludes at the start of each act determine the character of the music for a time ( except for Interlude V , which is abruptly curtailed by the Barn Dance music of Act Three scene one , lending thereafter only a few sinister flecks of moonlight ) .
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