Example sentences of "we do not understand " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Hepworth was to speak wistfully of ‘ a pressure in the air which we did not understand ’ , saying that ‘ we worked on as best we could in spite of it . ’ |
| 2 | At that time , thanks in particular to the work of Morgan and his colleagues on Drosophila , we had an abstract model of how genes are arranged on chromosomes , and of how they are transmitted from generation to generation , but we did not understand the chemistry of genes , or their replication , or their role in protein synthesis . |
| 3 | A Dorset village boy was sent ‘ to a very old man ’ to be taught to read , but learnt little : the old man stood ‘ facing the window , puffing away at his pipe , and when we would ask him to explain anything that we did not understand , he would tell us that he watched the chimneys to see when other people lit their fires … . ’ |
| 4 | We did not understand the law , we did not understand our rights . |
| 5 | We did not understand the law , we did not understand our rights . |
| 6 | We did not understand the word for this , so the captain resorted to mime . |
| 7 | We know that nutrients added to the water by humans make the algae grow , this combined with the sunlight causes blooms , but beyond that we do not understand much about the toxins . ’ |
| 8 | The plan is not a blueprint for the future , it stresses , merely the starting signal for a process in which dialogue and choices made by individuals , private industry and government will shape the environmental programmes : ‘ What we want to do , in the realization that we do not understand all the relationships , is to indicate the conditions under which an environmental quality can be attained that will provide future generations with as many options as possible . ’ |
| 9 | It occurred to Hobbes that since knowledge , whether systematically developed or not , begins with sense-perception , we should not pride ourselves on knowing much if we do not understand what sense-perception actually is . |
| 10 | Interaction between the corpuscles of an almond and those of our taste-buds results in the production , in our minds , of a certain idea , that of sweetness ; though quite how such causation between the physical and the mental takes place is , Locke says , a mystery which we do not understand . |
| 11 | We do not understand that we have become the slaves of our desire and have created a net around ourselves , by our thoughts and actions . |
| 12 | The whole question of ancient alignment practices remains an important enigma : we do not understand the British cursus-type features ( earthen avenues ) or stone-rows , much less the Andean lines . |
| 13 | It may be modern unwillingness to accept that there were activities in ancient societies which we do not understand that accounts for the embarrassing silence of archaeology on the Andean lines and its stubborn resistance to a proper treatment of the ley theory in Britain . |
| 14 | But we do not understand the nuances of bird , animal , insect or other creatures , communication , because we do not possess their inward experience of mental meaning . |
| 15 | Among humans , even when we do not understand the words , the manner of expression still tells us a great deal of what is being communicated , especially at a basic level of feeling , emotion and facts of physical life . |
| 16 | It is easy to tell if someone is angry or friendly towards us , even if we do not understand their language . |
| 17 | After all , their species-specific infrared radiations are detectable by insects — either as ‘ visible scents ’ from flower and leaf and root , or from the leaf and hair structures behaving as frequency-specific aerials or from other biophysical processes which we do not understand . |
| 18 | Little wonder that we do not understand the basic ingredients of Aboriginal culture in Australia ; our education teaches us nothing about these workings of nature or how we inter-relate with them . |
| 19 | Though we do not understand it , the meaning is there . ’ |
| 20 | ‘ Thirdly , we do not understand the timing of this cancellation of the Urban Programme . |
| 21 | So , although we know that the phenomenology of motion-perception varies under differing conditions , we do not understand why our experience varies as it does . |
| 22 | About one hundred million years ago , for reasons that we do not understand , the ammonite dynasty began to dwindle . |
| 23 | We do not understand it , they say , by which they seem to mean that we can not set it out in everyday words ( though actually one can go some way towards doing so , as I tried to do in Chapter V of The particle Play ) . |
| 24 | Yet we do not understand what is going on . |
| 25 | The male does sometimes mate with one of the young female helpers but this , for reasons we do not understand , never seems to result in pregnancy . |
| 26 | Indeed it is possible that we do not understand these things very well unless standardization is taken into account . |
| 27 | Perhaps , for reasons we do not understand , the patterns of interconnections in the smell-brain are under a more versatile system of genetic control , and this allowed the rapid evolution of the neocortex , facilitating the neopallial explosion . |
| 28 | We do not understand the logic behind this assertion , and its implications are worrying . |
| 29 | We fail to engage in social marketing because we do not understand it . |
| 30 | We look for a hand to hold , a shoulder to weep on , another body to cling to — anything that will reassure us that we are not alone , abandoned and helpless in the face of forces we do not understand . |