Example sentences of "they could [vb infin] [be] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Throughout the past Five Nations series it was said that Ireland had reached rock-bottom , particularly against Wales and Scotland , and the only way they could go was up . |
| 2 | Oh they , now they could 've been . |
| 3 | No it 's erm , on , on Monday , on Monday morning they could 've been working |
| 4 | Well why did n't they get a mile away from where they put that money they could 've , they could 've been planned it away , a mile away all |
| 5 | But they could 've been talking about something personal and we would 've heard everything they said . |
| 6 | Mrs Hill says she 's trying to arrange a meeting with the foreign office , she says the least they could do is apologise . |
| 7 | I did go down to my local Citizens ' Advice Bureau to see if they had any ideas , but all they could do was pass on the news that there was a squeeze on the social fund ( the emergency payments fund ) , so I was well advised not to expect too much if I did decide to try the social security people . |
| 8 | As the Labour dissidents in the Cabinet recognized , they did not have the power — they were a minority in the Cabinet as well as in the Commons — to avoid such a cut ; all that they could do was to ensure that it was not a Labour government which imposed it . |
| 9 | All they could do was to look at her but no one could read Rose 's face and they turned back to their books . |
| 10 | The best thing they could do was comb the hundreds of pubs in the area . |
| 11 | All they could do was plead for commonsense or , in desperation , threaten a stern lecture from Anna Essinger , a device which usually succeeded when all else had failed . |
| 12 | All they could do was talk about their next movie , and I 'm thinking , ‘ Have we finished this one ? ’ ’ |
| 13 | Gillroy and Davies hit the roof several times before managing to strap themselves down in the cabin , where all they could do was sit ashen-faced and pray . |
| 14 | All they could do was wait . |
| 15 | All they could do was arrange the particles in families , as in botany . |
| 16 | All they could do was watch and wait , trigger off several fuses and watch them burn until one of them , hopefully , ran its full course . |
| 17 | All they could do was work from day to day , from performance to performance , and through the second week , Charles started to feel his confidence in the part building up again . |
| 18 | So there was no entrance there and all they could do was clear by the main lodge . |
| 19 | One of their colleagues had vanished in mysterious circumstances and all they could do was make up imaginary England cricket teams . |
| 20 | They only thing they could do was to go walk up to walk up a road to and contact the Evie bus but it did n't come down along for years and years . |
| 21 | one is that i it may be that the old moral economy worked because the peasants recognized that , in a sense , that was the way they w well they , they could not stand up and criticize the landlord th the , the most they could do was to try and get the landlord to behave in a reasonable way , and that within that there would then be the sub-culture , the counter-culture of , of beginnings of mutual aid and what is happening in is in part that the communists are making them think the old moral economy work , but in part they are picking up on those sub- culture bits because the , the , the whole of mutual aid idea is , is coming from existing peasant cooperations . |
| 22 | Police made fifty arrests , mostly on drugs charges , but say that for most of the time , all they could do was watch . |
| 23 | By the time they arrived the party was in full swing and all they could do was watch . |
| 24 | Chief Executive says all they could do was to stand and watch the water getting higher . |
| 25 | Thirty of them made the trip to Gulfstream Park and the best they could manage was one Irish and one French third place , both well beaten . |
| 26 | After the interval , all they could manage was a forwards ' try , by McIvor , and it was left to the home scrum-half , Tony Devlin , to notch the only touchdown — in the last minute — with a fine individual effort . |
| 27 | The truckers ' strike during July and August 1973 was also largely motivated by controls — the shortages of spare parts for their trucks , official discrimination against them in favour of state-run firms , and the fact that the charges which they could make were fixed by the government but not adjusted to take into account the rapid rate of inflation . |
| 28 | The best they could suggest was a Commonwealth exploratory mission . |
| 29 | A person writing a computer program , or a company manufacturing computer equipment will not necessarily be potentially liable to the world at large in negligence ; they will be liable , however , to those whom they could contemplate being adversely affected by any negligent act or omission of theirs . |
| 30 | Though the Dragon Princes were few the destruction they could wreak was unmatched then as it is now and few dared the wrath of Caledor . |