Example sentences of "what [noun] [vb past] [was/were] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | And what Peggy said was true . |
| 2 | Euripides would probably have said that what Aeschylus did was wrong because he did it unconsciously . |
| 3 | Politics in the Balkans always involved small interrelated élites : what communism did was to reinforce this tendency , and not just in the Balkans . |
| 4 | What Taylor suggested was that every now and then , but very rarely , a sheet of atoms is not complete . |
| 5 | In these days , looking at it through neutral eyes , what Jessica did was both very immoral and very dishonest . |
| 6 | The head stressed that what Balbinder needed was to be in a small group , not in a class of twenty-three . |
| 7 | What Durkheim did was transform or recontextualise the official statistics , which he well knew were less than satisfactory in many respects , produced by officials for administrative purposes , and relate them to his theoretical concerns . |
| 8 | What Thorfinn did was earn a breathing-space , and the right to lodge some sort of defence in the area . |
| 9 | What Manville needed was an argument with gut-weight , real pull . |
| 10 | What Ceauşescu managed was to marry the traditions of conspiracy and tight discipline , developed by Lenin and Stalin to bring the Communist Party to power , with the local legacy of Ottoman rule : the methods and the morals of cosa nostra . |
| 11 | What Ceauşescu proposed was the ‘ expansion of the socialist farming system to encompass all agriculture … ’ |
| 12 | Matey watched her , dark head bent over her work , hands busy , having mastered the basics of the task with what Matey thought was surprising speed . |
| 13 | And if what Cadfael suspected was indeed true , he had now good reason to be on his best behaviour . |
| 14 | Essentially what Darwin realized was that sexual dimorphism , particularly where it makes the male spectacularly different from female is not always the outcome of inter-male conflict , very often it is , we saw examples of the films of stags , of erm elephant seals , those kinds of animals where the dimorphic differences appear to be the result of inter-male conflict , for instance elephant seals are seven times heavier , the males are seven times heavier than the females on average because sheer weight is what wins those astonishing battles they have on the beaches when they , they kind of lunge at each other . |
| 15 | Increasingly through last year it became apparent that what CSRG wanted was ‘ basically the same thing as BSDI : ’ an unencumbered commercial system . |
| 16 | What separatists did was to reduce the very complex set of circumstances which combine to oppress women , to a single uncluttered issue . |
| 17 | What Hope needed was a stage , a part and an audience . |
| 18 | What Yves meant was that in every act , in every gesture in the game , there is a degree of aggression . |
| 19 | What Russia needed was revolutionary cells with roots among the people and contempt for abstract theory . |
| 20 | For instance , Hickey includes many conversational passages that purport to be verbatim records , but must be reconstructions of what Hickey thought was appropriate to have been said on the occasion . |
| 21 | What Einstein did was to suggest that there exists a tensor identity between space–time curvature and a tensor , the stress-energy tensor , describing the distribution of matter . |
| 22 | In a memorable phrase Mr Perot suggested that what GM needed was ‘ the capitalist equivalent of Mao 's cultural revolution ’ . |
| 23 | What Dickens saw was what most of us see , the inhumanity of treating a child in certain ways . |
| 24 | What Dickens liked was the last thing he wished to have lying in , or rather on , his stomach . |
| 25 | But what Hume did was criticize the logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence for the existence of a God . |
| 26 | Another group , exclusively male , was gathered around what Sendei guessed was a highly advanced piece of technology . |
| 27 | The ‘ tendentious ’ story would soon be out of the way , making possible a return to what Dostoevsky thought was much more important , the Life of a Great Sinner project . |
| 28 | What Owen wanted was to be in and out fast . |
| 29 | The Ezbekiya did indeed have its moments , in the very early morning when there were few people about and the big falcons sailed over it with their unexpectedly musical cries and the Egyptian doves cooed softly in the palm trees , but on the whole what Owen liked was the Ezbekiya 's outside . |
| 30 | His face screwed up into what Delaney thought was pain , but suddenly realised it was an attempt at a grin . |