Example sentences of "had been [v-ing] for [noun pl] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | He scored another victory recently when the Labour Party abolished the unions ' block vote in the leadership elections , something he had been advocating for ages . |
| 2 | Long 's health had been deteriorating for years , but he had kept open his channels of communication ; like Law his influence was based on years of devotion to the interests of the party , and like Law 's that influence had been used to argue the case for coalition . |
| 3 | We had been looking for tasks that were : |
| 4 | The maypole committee , of which Amos was president , had been looking for ways of raising funds for the May weekend and old folks ' treat ( of which more later ) , the most important weekend in the lives of the villagers . |
| 5 | By searching for flashes repeating at exactly the same rate as the radio pulses , they were able to investigate much fainter pulsations than if they had been looking for pulses occurring at an unknown rate . |
| 6 | Then , towards the end of January , people noticed that at least one boar was coming right up to the village in its nighttime foraging : there were tracks in the snow and patches of scratched earth where it had been digging for roots . |
| 7 | They first told police they had been hunting for foxes . |
| 8 | She woke early on the morning of July 29 , 1981 which is not surprising as her room overlooked the Mall where the singing , chattering crowds had been gathering for days . |
| 9 | She had been intending for days to make a start on clearing out the cloakroom ; now was the moment — she would make a preliminary survey , set aside what should be kept , see if there was anything good enough for Oxfam . |
| 10 | The ancient Egyptians had been trying for centuries to prevent the export of their sacred felines . |
| 11 | Sylvia had been trying for years to overcome her claustrophobia , but with little or no success . |
| 12 | My head was n't really in the right state for assimilating all this stuff , but as far as I could gather , Uncle Rory had been trying for years to come up with something Creative ( his capital , his italics ) . |
| 13 | MIT members were shown , in detail , the market which they had been trying for years to service . |
| 14 | Mr Wolski knew already that the old eagle had been ailing for months now and that three weeks ago they had finally taken her out of her cage and into the veterinary block to see if there was anything they could do for her . |
| 15 | Others have progressed rapidly in the beginning , only to experience considerable difficulty in overcoming the final hurdle — almost as though the mind was loath to give up a fear to which it had been clinging for years . |
| 16 | Thus flighted , I sent them shooting out over the mud and the water towards their suffocating ends ; then I buried them , using as coffins the big matchboxes we always kept by the stove , and which I had been saving for years and using as toy-soldier containers , model houses and so on . |
| 17 | ‘ 63 teams from all over the UK took part , and it was clear that many had been training for months . |
| 18 | And just in case any men out there still need to be convinced that cleanliness is next to Robert Redfordness , how about the tale of a friend of mine who was desperate to impress a woman he had been pursuing for weeks . |
| 19 | Don had been experimenting for years before he took out the patent in 1970 and significantly stated that ‘ The difference in camber and relative incidence on the central fore and aft sections serves to stabilise the kite in pitch ’ . |
| 20 | Below them , a large group of human subjects had been circling for hours around a roller rink set among the trees . |
| 21 | Sulphur candles had been burning for days , leaving the house free of vermin , then the whole place had been painted from top to bottom . |
| 22 | In Australia , he had rejuvenated a sport that had been declining for years ; in England , he did exactly the same , leaving people exhilarated by his team 's play wherever they went and creating a great new surge of interest in the game . |
| 23 | She did n't know if they had been driving for minutes or days . |
| 24 | For a start there were the Trumper 's advertisements on TV — a whole series of them , which had been running for years . |
| 25 | People had been waiting for years for freedom ‘ and they 've now had enough ’ . |
| 26 | It had been waiting for weeks . |
| 27 | It never occurred to me that anyone who had been starving for years would feel an incredible , overwhelming urge to eat that was both physical and emotional . |
| 28 | The canyon ran parallel to the continuation of the wadi which I had been following for days . |
| 29 | Like the ‘ Samson ’ , it is an important rediscovery , once in the Demidoff Collection , that had been missing for decades and was last seen in at the C.L.Cardon sale in Brussels in 1921 . |
| 30 | Having accepted the ground rules , all the Grants appreciated and relished a structure that allowed a degree of communication they had been missing for years . |