Example sentences of "over a [adv] long [noun sg] " in BNC.

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1 It has proved extremely difficult , too , to find significant changes in attitudes in many markets except over a rather long period — which does not disprove the theory , but suggests either that advertising does not work very fast , which no one wishes to admit , or that attitudes are not the whole of the story .
2 When you spread work like this over a very long period you are able to look into yourself , and see yourself in a great work of art .
3 The fact that it is very difficult to do does n't prevent a lot of people wishing to achieve it , but it is very seldom that , in the industrial world , anybody has achieved and held continuously a pre-eminent position over a very long period of time .
4 Investigations into the activities of this particular gang had been carried out over a very long period and they had been kept under constant surveillance by our officers who were thus able to feed us all the necessary information towards a successful interception .
5 The apes being taught are therefore without an evolutionarily conferred advantage that human children enjoy — that of employing learning techniques , and being initiated by their elders , in a way that has presumably been refined by selection pressures over a very long time .
6 Fussler and Simon , in Patterns in the use of books in large research libraries , affirmed that ‘ past use over a sufficiently long period is an excellent and by far the best predictor of future use ’ , although they observed , ‘ the confidence limits of prediction vary significantly from one subject to another ’ .
7 Incidentally , Dubhe and Alkaid are moving across the sky in a direction opposite to that of the remaining five stars , so that over a sufficiently long period the Plough will lose its familiar shape .
8 The corrosion emanated from the joint between the bottom of the pressure dome and the fuselage and there was nicotine tar staining on the edge of the corroded area indicating that it had developed over a relatively long period .
9 This was particularly the case with patients who had been given methadone reduction over a relatively long period of time , say two to three months .
10 In the developed world , the harnessing of fossil fuel energy as well as other scientific developments , and their application to agricultural systems , has opened up a new range of agricultural possibilities : but all this has happened over a relatively long time period and is not without its environmental implications .
11 Moreover , a secretary attached to a legation or an embassy and not to an individual minister or ambassador , and remaining at his post over a fairly long period , could become a valuable source of information about local conditions : this might be of great help to a new head of mission coming to a strange country of which he knew little .
12 What we try to do is to make available to people opportunities for study in depth and over a fairly long period of time , on issues and in subjects which are part of University activity .
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