Example sentences of "[v-ing] was " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Top Flying-boats had a glamorous image , but disembarking was often an undignified scramble . |
| 2 | Rush hour crowding was a serious hazard , and the station was 39 per cent understaffed . |
| 3 | What he was denying was their ability to achieve the outcomes to which the opportunities for mutually advantageous trade clearly pointed . |
| 4 | Despite its limitations and difficulties , dowsing was one of the sources of inspiration for the Dragon Project , which I mentioned briefly at the beginning of the last chapter . |
| 5 | All a far cry from the practices of old when panel pressing was labour intensive and slow . |
| 6 | That white car was overtaking was n't he ? |
| 7 | The last thing in the world she had thought of becoming was a parson 's wife , and if she were to consider it for any length of time she would refuse through lack of courage . |
| 8 | The great virtue of Cagney to the Hollywood set-up was that he could realistically depict anger , violence , and meanness without in any way suggesting that he was personally a worthless villain or that the film in which he was appearing was deliberately condoning these unpleasant qualities . |
| 9 | The beach at Barra ( population 1500 ) was a different story from the day before — blue sky and lesser wind , so landing was a routine non-event . |
| 10 | Except that it 's more likely the man , because , you know , the child talked about him dying , but in a funny way , as if dying was another name for something else . |
| 11 | I felt what was happening was we were going not in the direction of addition , but of total change . |
| 12 | I had no idea that what was happening was my body trying to bring itself up to a natural weight rather than the unnatural , low one that I kept it at . |
| 13 | They pretended that what was happening was not happening , and if it were to happen , it would certainly never happen to the likes of them . |
| 14 | What was happening was that the broomstick was swooping up into the sky , now dotted with stars , and that Carol was astride it , just like a witch in a fairy-tale . |
| 15 | But all that was happening was , the overflow pipe from the Koi quarters was partially blocked : this meant that an abnormally high head of water was building up in the main pool , bringing the level above the sealed junction between liner and blockwork . |
| 16 | And what was happening was , I was dripping sweat into it and rusting bits and shorting the battery . |
| 17 | What was happening was this . |
| 18 | What was happening was rather different . |
| 19 | Over bacon , cabbage and wine we had admired the elegance of the line that as prison walls got lower what was really happening was that prison was not disappearing but dissolving . |
| 20 | While the differences between the crown of France and its vassals were expressed in a language which was essentially feudal ( a new political vocabulary more suited to developments had not yet evolved ) , what was really happening was something remarkably ‘ modern ’ , the laying of the foundations of a national state under one monarch whose territorial authority could only be effectively exercised through annexation or conquest . |
| 21 | What seemed to be happening was the spread of population growth out from the major urban centres where it had occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressively to the more rural periphery , leaving a population loss in its wake . |
| 22 | What had been happening was an assumption of power on the part of the Vietminh and the demonstration that a communist party could seize the opportunity to capitalize on the power of nationalism at a moment of unparalleled opportunity . |
| 23 | Now that meant that there was massively increasing pressure on China 's land , and there was growing parcelization of the land and what was happening was that peasant families would of very often er produce two or three sons |
| 24 | One of the few to grasp what was happening was Lieutenant-Colonel Laurens Van der Post , the South African writer who had been a POW and who spoke Dutch . |
| 25 | Barbara Coleman was saying something about the former beauty of the garden and its decline , but wondering aloud whether it was fair to say decline because what was happening was that the garden was returning to nature , and further wondering whether it was really and truly nature because some of the plants were not native to the region and did not entirely belong there , and then wondering whether that was not a strange remark to come from one who had made Provence her home for so long that she felt quite a part of the landscape . |
| 26 | And this Fulham woman who was administering arsenic , only all that was happening was her hubby was getting a tingling in his feet . " |
| 27 | To the outside world what was happening was a tightening-up of some matters , a clearing out of unexamined clutter and the creation of a sense of accountability . |
| 28 | What was happening was they were starting they were ready to start up their own company to hire managers . |
| 29 | She 'd only pulled away because she knew what was happening was wrong , not because she had n't been enjoying it . |
| 30 | What was happening was not a temporary phenomenon , with increasing evidence of low-cost drinks being hawked around and reports of the first off-licence closure attributed to duty-free imports . |