Example sentences of "it [was/were] [adv] possible [to-vb] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Yet the pollution control sections of the agencies are ultimately impotent to secure the compliance of their colleagues in sewage treatment , lacking recourse to the legal sanction ( even if it were organizationally possible to prosecute fellow-workers ) . |
| 2 | But if by any chance it were ever possible to locate this ‘ vernacular ’ in the usage of an informant , we would have no criteria for demonstrating that we had located it , any more than we could locate ‘ the dialect ’ in the speech of a single informant . |
| 3 | It was thus possible to assemble a bridge pier and lower it complete onto the river bed . |
| 4 | It was thus possible to balance the attraction of the matter with the repulsion of the cosmological term . |
| 5 | It was thus possible to write a program that allocated scores to all the possible legal moves in a given position . |
| 6 | As part of this study , it was additionally possible to investigate ( a ) a variety of domain-specific dictionaries and compare their performance with the general dictionary , and ( b ) the extent to which collocations compiled from one domain could contribute to the recognition of text from another . |
| 7 | The houses gave way to shops and the slope levelled off , then he was in a narrow main street where it was easily possible to hop on one leg from one gift shop to the next … all of them closed until Easter . |
| 8 | Here it was even possible to freewheel at speed without the risk of the front wheel submerging into a pool of smelly black moss . |
| 9 | It was even possible to get children in the slum districts of a great city to love such a poem as Wordsworth 's " Daffodils " . |
| 10 | In the heat of last summer it was even possible to run up ‘ minus points ’ on the melanoma scale . |
| 11 | It was even possible to scent resin oozing from the hot wood of a dock , the air of warmth and freedom . |
| 12 | In most of the tests it was also possible to compare the results with those in age and sex matched healthy volunteers with and without H pylori . |
| 13 | It was also possible to judge the viability of a British PWR by looking at the experience of the United States . |
| 14 | It was also possible to argue that the size of armies must be limited by the capacity of society to maintain them : Montesquieu believed that a ruler could hardly afford to have more than one per cent of his subjects under arms simultaneously , and other writers put the proportion still lower . |
| 15 | It was also possible to classify the States of Europe according to their ability to wage war , whether on their own or with the help of subsidies and other encouragements from their more powerful neighbours . |
| 16 | It was also possible to investigate the departure of the planets from Kepler 's laws due to the finite mass of the sun , interplanetary forces , etc . |
| 17 | Through this , it was also possible to calculate the the time taken for the simple reaction time involved in the relay of messages between the brain and the hand . |
| 18 | But it was also possible to make direct studies of how a single population adapted to changes taking place in its local environment . |
| 19 | The first studies were in coal mines where there were different degrees of mechanisation associated with the same type of working group and it was also possible to distinguish different social organisations working in similar technical environments ( Trist and Murray , 1948 ) . |
| 20 | It was just possible to see some buildings in the distance . |
| 21 | John had claimed it was just possible to go backwards ( as it were ) , but you must talk to him about that . |
| 22 | The wind and rain on the little hill above Jaffa had ripped away at the paint but it was just possible to make out the words ‘ David Damiani ’ to the left of the broken wooden gate . |
| 23 | It was just possible to make out the 300 foot radio mast at the Davistow Airfield , an ex-military airfield well worth a visit , offering splendid moorland isolation and three concrete runways , the longest being 1550 metres . |
| 24 | Out to sea the beam of the lighthouse swept a great arc every fifteen seconds ; on one side of the headland were the lights of the town and harbour , on the other it was just possible to make out a line of cliffs receding into the darkness . |
| 25 | Jarvis 's money brought him in a tiny income , on which it was just possible to subsist if he walked everywhere , never went to the cinema , ate anything nice , smoked , drank , bought new clothes nor used the phone . |
| 26 | Cursive in nature , secretary was a distinct hand initially , and written upright , but slopes were soon introduced ( in the interests of writing at speed ) and by 1637 it was already possible to speak of ‘ sett ’ , ‘ facill ’ and ‘ fast ’ hands , or , less opaquely , ‘ engrossing ’ ‘ upright ’ and ‘ sloped ’ . |
| 27 | Let us suppose that it was somehow possible to banish the feelings which give rise to such ugly behaviour in human beings . |
| 28 | In addition , people had access to other written materials : shaikhs kept lists of members of their lineages , and it was sometimes possible to reconstruct a genealogy from them . |
| 29 | It is interesting to observe that although there were no roads along the valley bottoms to Keswick which were usable by carts , it was quite possible to cart materials down to Penny Bridge . |
| 30 | However , fundamental changes were not inevitable , as it was quite possible to maintain the service management role for the foreseeable future , with Colleges obtaining and utilising resources in the manner previously prescribed and implemented . |