Example sentences of "were so [adj] as [verb] " in BNC.

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1 On Jan. 8 the Defence Ministry sought to justify its operation against draft-dodgers by declaring that conscription levels were so low as to threaten national security .
2 When any seeds arrive from him I will take the first opportunity of sending you a share and in return shall trouble you for some Northern and Welsh plants which I hope we shall make proper conveniency to receive into our Garden in a short time ; for several of those which you were so good as to furnish me with a few years since are lost for want of proper soil and situation , the natural earth of our Garden being too light and dry and the bottom too warm .
3 The specimens you were so good as to send to me by Captain Lyon would have been a treasure had they arrived safe ; but his ship was taken by the French , so those were all lost , which is a great misfortune at this time , when they would have been of great service to me , in ascertaining the names of some plants which remain doubtful .
4 It should not be supposed from such criteria for choosing Christianity or retaining paganism that pagans were so simple-minded as to think prosperity and material adversity automatic grounds for conversion or retention of paganism as the case might be .
5 Perhaps the immediate and justified reaction was that the proposals in the Green Paper were so sketchy as to pose an unenviable choice between ‘ a crude centralist and an equally crude local authority solution ’ .
6 He and his advisers were so dismayed as to misread the letter , for the reply makes it clear that they understood the meeting of the princes to have taken place already .
7 If the sender is traceable , probably the most sensible thing to do is to notify him that the goods are at his risk and to request him to fetch them ; and if ( as is likely with perishables ) the goods become a nuisance , the recipient would surely be justified in abating the nuisance by destroying them , even without notice to the sender , if the emergency were so pressing as to leave him no time to give it .
8 Even if we make the comparison with the earlier part of the twentieth century when people were beginning to live longer , the economic conditions of family life were so different as to make a decision to take an old person into one 's home , if they could not maintain themselves , a very different decision from its equivalent today .
9 Some of his preferences were so extreme as to appear perverse .
10 But for the majority , conditions were so atrocious as to justify Dostoevskii 's description of the Siberian penal system as ‘ The House of the Dead ’ .
11 He went to the village school in Crawcrook , where his abilities were so marked as to attract the attention of his father 's landlord , Sir Thomas Liddell ( later first Baron Ravensworth ) , to whose collieries in Killingworth , Northumberland , he was sent in April 1811 to learn the business of a viewer or colliery manager .
12 Some people were so bold as to suggest that he had now lost his grip and was writing pretty fair garbage .
13 However , his stated grounds for that opinion were a figment of his imagination : his misdescriptions of the performance were so fundamental as to vitiate any factual basis for his criticism .
14 Other defects were so trivial as to have no effect .
15 In certain circumstances the trial judge might feel that the facts relating to the making of statements such as those made in this case to Mr. O'Hanlon were so unusual as to justify him in directing the prosecution to furnish them to the defence , but this must be a matter within the discretion of the trial judge .
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