Example sentences of "it [vb past] [det] years " in BNC.

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1 In fact , on any view it started many years before that , though in a haphazard manner .
2 A property it acquired many years ago is carried at a valuation .
3 Even so , it took many years for Ali to ascend to a pre-eminent light in the national consciousness .
4 In China it took many years for the railway to broach the capital .
5 But it took many years for the ordinary people of the area to benefit from tourism in any worthwhile economic sense .
6 Though his union did not entirely disappear in Hull it took many years to recover .
7 It took many years for linguists and sociolinguists to devise ways of getting the best of both worlds .
8 It took many years for scientists studying malaria to realise it was the mosquito that was important , not the messenger from the martians .
9 They were mostly wrong , but it took several years to find out .
10 He established himself in the heart of Sicily , near Etna , about 449 , and it took several years and several expeditions by Syracuse to dislodge him .
11 It took several years to acknowledge that all this higher searching was based on my father 's money .
12 Now it took several years for er the new incentive scheme to be introduced throughout the whole of the works and I think during my last discussion you know , I did indicate that the fitters for example , you know , were about the last group to go on .
13 It took some years for a lobby to emerge , strong enough to bring pressure to bear on the scandal of the continuing presence of the nineteenth-century slums .
14 Another role for town planning beckoned ; it took some years for regional economic planning practice to take coherent shape , but the gauntlet of the conceptual challenge had been thrown down .
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