Example sentences of "had been a [n mass] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Harris , who had been a cavalry trooper before a French cannonball had crushed his left foot at the battle of Corunna , laughed at the naivety of the question . |
| 2 | Before the war , it had been a fruit market and bus station ; one side of its nineteenth-century Levantine façade had served as the entrance to the souk . |
| 3 | Laba , who was later to become one of our shipmates , had been a fruit farmer and had only recently taken up sailing on the advice of the local shaman after a string of close calls with pythons . |
| 4 | There had been a pair using this barn , but , as so often happens these days , they deserted their nest . |
| 5 | This he threw with a flicking movement on to a pile of scrap iron before making his way towards them , kicking out of his path and on to yet another pile the remnants of what had been a pair of trousers . |
| 6 | My going-away present to them had been a pair of inflatable yellow wheel clamps which I 'd attached front and aft to their VW Golf . |
| 7 | Liam Miller , the producer , sounded a cautious note later , saying the spectacular had been a £2.5 million operation involving a lot of time and resources . |
| 8 | Stating that there had been a £207,000 overspend , Mr Hindmarsh warned any office managers continuing to go over budget would be made to explain why . |
| 9 | It was only at this late stage that she began to think about them ; they had been a means to an end , Frederica Potter 's removal from Blesford and Yorkshire . |
| 10 | The last six years of his life — since Judith , in fact — had been a series of duplicities . |
| 11 | Not only was the demand not to materialize but the revolution in distribution costs introduced by containerization , changes in marine technology and handling methods at docks opened up the world from what had been a series of regional markets to a single one . |
| 12 | There had been a series of rumours about accidents : pods which malfunctioned on impact , leaving their passengers trapped and helpless ; pods which misinterpreted conditions of temperature and air pressure , releasing their human cargo while they were still several kilometres above ground . |
| 13 | Evidently there had been a series of mass extinctions followed each time by the appearance of an entirely new set of species that formed the population of the next stable period . |
| 14 | The Doctor explained that in the late nineteenth century there had been a series of unsolved murders committed in the East End of London . |
| 15 | There had been a series of photographs showing Adam with a series of women , each one more gorgeous than the last , and each one looking up at him with undisguised adoration . |
| 16 | Nurse Geeson said she had been a staff nurse on the children 's ward for ten years up to 1991 and had only come across four or five occasions when children suffered heart or respiratory attacks . |
| 17 | Since 1492 , when they were evicted from Spain , Tangier Jews had been a people without a country , owing allegiance to no one but the Jewish nation . |
| 18 | If it had been a mackerel , yes exactly ! |