Example sentences of "[noun pl] had [be] [v-ing] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | A British Transport police spokesman said : ‘ Fans had been drinking heavily before the accident and would have been fairly merry . ’ |
| 2 | The Dean crowd and their successors had been smoking as a regular habit ten years earlier but only now , at the height of the Vietnam crisis , when the futility of the war was beginning to dawn with the return of disillusioned young soldiers prepared at last to tell the truth , were drugs beginning to appear on the American campus scene and in London streets in any volume . |
| 3 | At the NoS offices the champagne corks had been popping . |
| 4 | The brothers had been living in a penthouse flat in Bickenhall Street , west London , bought in December for £1 million cash . |
| 5 | In London , where he had been apprenticed as a young man , the poky City offices had been suffocating . |
| 6 | The animals had been recovering at a wildlife sanctuary , and were ready to go back into the wild . |
| 7 | A useful technique to employ in such situations is to carry out a pasture larval count on the field on which the animals had been grazing . |
| 8 | They seemed to come into focus only slowly , a silent mass of tightly packed yellow faces glistening with perspiration ; scores of dark eyes had been watching him unwaveringly all the time , but their expressions remained uniformly blank . |
| 9 | His eyes had been feeding on darkness and projections for too long , and now , presented with solid reality , they were befuddled . |
| 10 | The Secte Rouge guards had been charging the Marines with their machetes , to little effect , though a couple of Marines had gone down . |
| 11 | Crimean Tatars had been drifting back to their former homeland since 1987 , and a June 1988 central government ruling confirmed their right to residency [ see p. 36036 ] . |
| 12 | The cocks had been fighting , but between themselves . |
| 13 | Although a number of influential parties had been trying to have New Year 's flay changed from the old style 13th of the month to 1st , the majority of the natives were loath to change and both days were partially observed . |
| 14 | These were the first multiparty elections to be held in the Soviet Union , the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet having in December 1989 abolished the constitutionally guaranteed communist monopoly of power [ see p. 37129 ] and having earlier in February passed a new law regulating the establishment and functioning of new political parties ; in fact new or revived political parties had been emerging in Lithuania since the beginning of 1989 [ see pp. 36487 ; 36854 ] . |
| 15 | Then I found out my kids had been going into someone 's house and coming out with money . |
| 16 | The ovoid seemed to project a kind of deadly aura and , as Rostov compared the black egg shape with his memory of the framework structures which he had encountered previously , he wondered if the designers had been striving consciously for the visual effect which they had achieved . |
| 17 | Up to then the UK and Irish entries had been fighting a tooth and nail contest . |
| 18 | Doubts had been growing over Merseyside 's ability to gain Objective One status and the estimated £1bn package of EC grants it could bring . |
| 19 | The stabbing happened after the two teenagers had been drinking heavily . |
| 20 | Six of the escapers had been facing death sentences . |
| 21 | Because of the recession , stockpiles of ‘ new ’ cars had been waiting for a buyer for up to two years . |
| 22 | ‘ Some of the lads had been feeling it and this gave them the chance to pay some of the bills that had been piling up . |
| 23 | He said the Iranians had been carrying out assassinations , including that of his own Japanese translator . |
| 24 | Finding that the Middlesbrough , Shields and Seaham branches had been accumulating funds , the Sunderland officials demanded that any surplus cash should be handed over to them at head office , threatening , according to Wilson 's account , " drastic action " if they failed to do so . |
| 25 | The aim was to ensure that subjects had been fixating correctly by requiring them to report this digit immediately prior to recalling the stimulus . |
| 26 | Below them , a large group of human subjects had been circling for hours around a roller rink set among the trees . |
| 27 | Dmitri had been checking it for misprints and left it to get messed up like this . |
| 28 | Her admirer had already been bound over to keep the peace after being arrested on her doorstep , and his unwelcome attentions had been going on for over six years . |
| 29 | After a dress rehearsal for a Symphony Hour show , I suggested , as producer , that in the adagio movement of the main symphonic item the violins had been taking the tempo slightly too fast . |
| 30 | The 20,000 urns and vases had been lying in deep salt water for 302 years . |