Example sentences of "[noun] [modal v] [verb] be less " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | These signals may have been less predictive of the outcome because they occurred at higher frequencies at earlier stages in the conflicts . |
| 2 | Though no official cost has been put on the deep-water well which led to the West of Shetland find , industry sources suggest the total outlay may have been less than £10 million . |
| 3 | Libya had a wealthier , more urbanized , more stably employed population than any of them and , by every canon of development science , Libyans ought to have been less influenced by atavism than other North Africans . |
| 4 | Our data might have been less affected by bias than those in other studies because we considered only women in whom the primary diagnosis was endometriosis . |
| 5 | Boro saw a 16-point lead cut in half as Long Eaton , outclassed in the opening races , won four of the last seven heats and the margin of defeat would have been less had the impressive Dane Jan Staechmann not slid into the safety boards in the final race when set for his fourth win of the night . |
| 6 | Had Barlow Clowes been shut down in 1985 , the total investment at risk in the offshore funds would have been less than £31 million . |
| 7 | Certain aspects of centres ' work may have been less successful than others ( there was a considerable and unproductive stress on making inefficient ‘ cheap ’ material such as bead microscopes ) and some centres like Nsukka , Nairobi , Domasi and Njala were more active than others but the overall record in terms of creation of exciting relevant material based on children 's experience is indeed impressive . |
| 8 | For contemporaries , the charm must have been less impressive than the sense of half-realised ambitions . |
| 9 | If she had realised how Luch spent her time , the abuse might have been less . |
| 10 | And animal minds , a fortiori , do not engage in this sort of computation ( which is why the Punch cartoon would have been less funny if it had shown a human fisherman ) . |
| 11 | ‘ Many of our recent troubles in retaining and maintaining public confidence might have been less severe and more easily solved if we had not begun to depart from the traditional relationships between ranks , ’ he added . |
| 12 | Without the republicans the Labour left would have remained abstract propagandists ; without the Labour left , the republicans would have been less able to communicate to people in Derry and beyond . |
| 13 | Yet he was also obstinate , even perverse ; his translations would have been less likely to have been seized by the authorities had they not been accompanied by the contentious marginal comments . |
| 14 | What two siblings could have been less alike than Jake and his very own brother , Ryan ? |
| 15 | ( It is perhaps worth noting that if the whole-tone scale had been that which begins on D♭ the degree of conflict would have been less . ) |
| 16 | the motive was to steal scrap metal from the company the amount of metal would have been less than a couple of hundred pounds so quite a minor incident in itself . |
| 17 | How contemporary Indian art will fare is less certain although Mr Thompson hoped that European dealers would attend the sale . |
| 18 | In consequence , for much of the Yorkist and early Tudor periods , the control of the Greencloth over the Household 's economy may have been less strict than was originally intended . |
| 19 | Lillian Faderman accepts that women 's relations may have been less physical in the past , but asserts that it is possible that such relations were still lesbian : |
| 20 | coast of Benbecula and S. Uist ( Ritchie , 1966 , 1979 , 1985 ; Currie , 1979 ) also suggest that the frequency of westerly storms must have been less prior to 4000 B.P. As Currie ( 1979 p. 227 ) suggests , ‘ the stumps remaining are not likely to be an indication of forest , but rather the evidence of such sheltered locations where small woods survived the climatic conditions , often in areas which are now submerged by the sea ’ . |
| 21 | Even though the story reverberated through the Highlands , there is no evidence that either Boswell or Johnson knew the tale — had they done so , Boswell might have been less merry with his lubricious reasons as to why the woman would not show them the bedroom . |
| 22 | ‘ And marriage itself might have been a useful bit of insurance for Gustav : her relatives or guardians would have been less likely to inform on her husband than on some passing stranger who could get his trousers open in Olympic time . ’ |
| 23 | For fourteen or fifteen years no man could have been less conscious of himself and of his own life , less informed about the world than Antoine Bloye . |
| 24 | Perhaps , too , if they had known about his ‘ tastes ’ , his friends would have been less puzzled by two of his most mysterious personality traits : his delight in verbal bullying , of students or intellectual opponents , and his apparently cheerful domestic enslavement to Mrs Moore . |
| 25 | The most recent work on the subject stresses the complexity and ambiguity of much of the legislation of this period regarding the serf population of Russia : it also suggests that after 1775 repression of peasant disorder may have been less arbitrary than before and that it was sometimes accompanied by efforts by provincial governors to persuade landowners to treat their peasants with greater humanity . |
| 26 | Third , Mars could have been less well veneered with volatiles after accretion was complete . |
| 27 | I think the show would have been less timid if he had sought out more of the artists in their 20s who nowadays keep coming up in mixed exhibitions in Liverpool , Birmingham , Leeds , Whitechapel and so on . |
| 28 | I had the idea Auntie Muriel might have been less tolerant about Michael if she met him . |
| 29 | The public would have been less impressed had it known the facts . |
| 30 | Indeed , knowledge was more limited and collections generally smaller when the schemes were devised , and so an analytic approach to classification would have been less appropriate than it is today . |