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rudimentary
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  • Eragon's skills were rudimentary, but he could now read whole pages without asking Brom's help.†   (source)
  • My eyes moved across all the rudimentary instruments and silent control panels arranged on either side of the cramped walkway.†   (source)
  • Sanitation in the villages is as rudimentary as it gets.†   (source)
  • Prior to 1900, most poets would have received at least rudimentary elements of a classical education—Latin, some Greek, lots of classical poetry and Dante and Shakespeare—certainly more than your average reader today.†   (source)
  • Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff, acts as gofer and limp-dicked adviser.†   (source)
  • He traveled the Idaho countryside, plugging the rudimentary machine into the nearest available light socket and sorting potatoes for farmers.†   (source)
  • Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity, Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar.†   (source)
  • They didn't need my rudimentary little pointers.†   (source)
  • It would be extremely short and rudimentary, as descriptions of this sort go.†   (source)
  • With assistance from the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina, Lafontant administered a rather rudimentary one-doctor health clinic in Mirebalais.†   (source)
  • She had a rudimentary knowledge of the law—it was a subject she had never had occasion to explore—and her faith in the police was generally exiguous.†   (source)
  • "It's a little rudimentary, but this book helped to teach me what it is to be human," he says.†   (source)
  • After the C.O.'s speech, we were handed picks and shovels and given rudimentary instructions as to the mining of lime.†   (source)
  • Maybe it was a rudimentary system, but it worked, more or less.†   (source)
  • It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary question: what is a gun?†   (source)
  • In her last months she had succeeded in communicating with him in phrases of rudimentary Latin.†   (source)
  • NEWLY ZEN thanks to Yoga Janet, well fed by Pop, and now proficient in concrete-mixing as well as rudimentary electrical work, I felt as if I were making the most of this prison thing.†   (source)
  • I wished I could speak Portuguese, or that my Spanish was less rudimentary, so that I could try to thank this woman who had dared to anger a vampire just to check on me.†   (source)
  • Such camp as there was was rudimentary.†   (source)
  • Just more germs, an all-pervading medium of pathogens, microbes, floating colonies of spirochetes that fuse and separate and elongate and spiral and engulf, whole trainloads of matter that people cough forth, rudimentary and deadly.†   (source)
  • Beginning in the 1930s, Sri Lanka set up a nationwide public health infrastructure, ranging from rudimentary health posts at the bottom to rural hospitals one tier up, and then district hospitals with more sophisticated services, and finally provincial hospitals and specialist maternity centers.†   (source)
  • That lab was pretty rudimentary but effective.†   (source)
  • By the time Adam and the thirty remaining students of Class 227 headed to San Clemente Island—seventy-five miles off the coast of San Diego—for some of the last weeks of their training, he had learned the rudimentary skills of a combat diver.†   (source)
  • "I'm looking for Sadhar Khan," Mortenson said, in the rudimentary Dari he'd coaxed Kais to teach him on the drive out of Kabul.†   (source)
  • He eyed their rudimentary flip chart.†   (source)
  • But she'd come to value the intangibles: the position she had grown to in the city where she was "Matron" to everyone, even to herself; the resourcefulness she'd discovered that allowed her to make a cozy hospital—an East African Eden, as she thought of it—grow out of a disorganized jumble of rudimentary buildings; and the core group of doctors whom she'd recruited and who by long association had evolved into her Cherished Own.†   (source)
  • They were wearing green T-shirts with the name of Justus's church on the back, scrawled above a rudimentary drawing of a '57 Chevy convertible.†   (source)
  • A sail-pod would have had only the most rudimentary means of treating such injuries, and the pilot had probably shoved me into a bare-bones version of a suspension pod to hold me until I could get to a medic.†   (source)
  • Few, if any, of my ancestors were ever given the privilege of the most rudimentary schooling, forget education.†   (source)
  • Many of the islands hadn't yet learned of the destruction of the king's navy and hadn't taken even the most rudimentary precautions against sea raiders.†   (source)
  • Most everyone on the staff seemed to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language and customs, how to say hello and goodbye and please wait a moment, how to bow down low enough and speak in a tone of respect with eyes cast at a deferential angle.†   (source)
  • I look at their pinafores and hair bows and their rudimentary faces and hands with distaste.†   (source)
  • Safia's Arabic was rudimentary at best.†   (source)
  • Humans have rudimentary Ms.†   (source)
  • Ootek had been taught a few words of English by Mike, and his perceptivity was so excellent that we were soon able to establish rudimentary communications.†   (source)
  • I've been told that all men are artists to a certain extent, so that everyone is capable of creating something, if only on a rudimentary level.†   (source)
  • Perhaps, she thought with resignation, with mild despair, if she explained the rudimentary part of it to him now, patiently and explicitly, she would get it all over with, and if she was lucky, be spared any further inquisitiveness about more somber and complex matters which she could never describe or reveal to anyone.†   (source)
  • Or, far more important, what of a more rudimentary nervous system?†   (source)
  • The roads and rest houses, always rudimentary, had gone; the tourists (foreigners who might be interested in cut-price photographic equipment) hadn't come.†   (source)
  • Olive also had to practice a rudimentary medicine, for there were constant accidents.†   (source)
  • He pushed open the door and— found himself in a small barrack bedroom with two bunk beds, a chair and a rudimentary desk.†   (source)
  • He was holding a photocopy of an ancient schematic diagram, which depicted a rudimentary machine.†   (source)
  • Then I realize this is a rudimentary attempt at minesweeping.†   (source)
  • In just a few minutes, he had made a rudimentary pipe bomb.†   (source)
  • His skills had progressed greatly since his first rudimentary experiments in New York.†   (source)
  • On the table lay a rudimentary copper chest, crusted with ancient patina.†   (source)
  • But the original was there as well'more jaded and rudimentary, functional rather than romantic.†   (source)
  • Then, in 1986, pushing forty, he took a vacation in H of A I Colorado, felt the siren song of the heights, and enrolled in a rudimentary mountaineering course in Rocky Mountain National Park.†   (source)
  • The relief was elliptical, about three feet long, and carved with a rudimentary face-a depiction of the West Wind as an angel-like countenance.†   (source)
  • His expertise extended only to the most rudimentary runic alphabet—Futhark—a third-century Teutonic system, and this was not Futhark.†   (source)
  • Moon was using the most rudimentary of all scams—making more drinks than he rang up—and when he did ring up drinks, he often propped the check on the cash register so it hid the numbers.†   (source)
  • I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant's discovery that her hand is her own.†   (source)
  • He used her to carry his secret messages, and he taught her rudimentary magic, which helped her remain undiscovered and, on occasion, extract information from people.†   (source)
  • In the real world, many places lacked even rudimentary health services, and others had clinics and hospitals staffed by the ignorant, the careless, the lazy.†   (source)
  • The right side of the barn was a rudimentary workshop—lawn-mowers, automotive tools, gardening supplies.†   (source)
  • But in a place where medicine is still scarce, and where food is scarcer than ever and the legal system is at best rudimentary, there will always be more sorcery consults and prison extractions to come.†   (source)
  • She was in the corner of the room, on her back on a rudimentary divan, hands tied behind her, mouth gagged.†   (source)
  • Sophie's university instructors, while presenting computer encryption methods for securing data, praised modern cryptologists like Zimmerman and Schneier but failed to mention that it was Leonardo who had invented one of the first rudimentary forms of public key encryption centuries ago.†   (source)
  • A rudimentary phallus.†   (source)
  • Most of the soldiers Eragon had fought on the Burning Plains had possessed certain rudimentary wards intended to shield them from magical attacks, and he suspected these men were likewise equipped.†   (source)
  • There were no physicians present, only ambulance drivers and ISIS "nurses" who had been given only rudimentary training.†   (source)
  • By this time, the authorities permitted me to have rudimentary communications with my comrades at Pollsmoor and Robben Island and also the ANC in Lusaka.†   (source)
  • On the other hand, when someone from the town had the opportunity to test the crude reality of the telephone installed in the railroad station, which was thought to be a rudimentary version of the phonograph because of its crank, even the most incredulous were upset.†   (source)
  • He'd cleaned the dust off the shelves and honed rudimentary reading skills into a taste for scholarship not uncommon among the Thieves of Eddis, and when he had fought his periodic, disastrous losing battles with his cousins, he had retreated to the library and his study-bedchamber to nurse his bruises.†   (source)
  • They speak a rudimentary English-milk, pee-pee, cookie-but have trouble with words like onion and union.†   (source)
  • At night or at siesta time he would call one of his women to his hammock and obtain a rudimentary satisfaction from her, and then he would sleep like a stone that was not concerned by the slightest indication of worry.†   (source)
  • Fearing that her stout and willful husband would rape her while she slept, Ursula, before going to bed, would put on a rudimentary kind of drawers that her mother had made out of sailcloth and had reinforced with a system of crisscrossed leather straps and that was closed in the front by a thick iron buckle.†   (source)
  • Possibly because this translation was felicitous and rich, or because Wolfe's lyrical, tragic though optimistic and sweeping vision of America was what Sophie's soul demanded at that moment—she being a newcomer to these shores, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the country's landscape and its gargantuan extravagance—it was Of Time and the River that excited her the most of all the books she read that winter and spring.†   (source)
  • "Why did they do it?" gasped Jan. Perhaps the presence of other minds disturbed them— even the rudimentary minds of plants and animals.†   (source)
  • There was already a rudimentary consciousness there, and we felt it fitting that we each get in touch to share the good news.†   (source)
  • With its small, rudimentary ears, this head had a positively malignant look.†   (source)
  • Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be).†   (source)
  • No one had given him even the rudimentary data of the somewhat rudimentary life of an American university.†   (source)
  • In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.†   (source)
  • But as I began to realize that the noises she made with her mouth resembled human speech and were more than rudimentary demands for, or expressions of gratification at, food or copulation, a certain resistance began to grow in me.†   (source)
  • She perceived the latter as confused boys of nineteen and twenty who as draftees were involved in a war they did not consider theirs, and who felt a rudimentary responsibility — or, at the very least, guilt — as fathers.†   (source)
  • And amicably, not as two white women and a negress, not as three negroes or three whites, not even as three women, but merely as three creatures who still possessed the need to eat but took no pleasure in it, the need to sleep but from no joy in weariness or regeneration, and in whom sex was some forgotten atrophy like the rudimentary gills we call the tonsils or the still-opposable thumbs for old climbing.†   (source)
  • Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.†   (source)
  • In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream.†   (source)
  • It will be objected that such art for the masses as folk art was developed under rudimentary conditions of production -- and that a good deal of folk art is on a high level.†   (source)
  • We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and primitive.†   (source)
  • —There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing.†   (source)
  • The rudimentary precautions to keep our imprisonment endurable he would not observe.†   (source)
  • Your sense of humour is rudimentary, my son.†   (source)
  • She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth.†   (source)
  • 'After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary stage.†   (source)
  • But whatever twinges of conscience he might have would be rudimentary, you may be sure.†   (source)
  • There were slight inherited traits of both in her, but they were rudimentary.†   (source)
  • The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely rudimentary.†   (source)
  • Frau Chauchat took a seat on a little round chair with rather rudimentary, stubby arms that stood beside the door to the laboratory; she leaned back, crossed one leg lightly over the other1, and stared into space, although the nervous distraction of being watched gave a certain sly squint to her Pribislav eyes.†   (source)
  • He might suffer the least rudimentary twinge of conscience in whatever he did, and in just so far he was evil and sinning.†   (source)
  • There was one among the boys a bit of a missionary, and he taught the thing to read, or at least to pick out letters, and gave him some rudimentary ideas of morality; but it seems the beast's habits were not all that is desirable.†   (source)
  • …sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other…†   (source)
  • He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking.†   (source)
  • What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes!†   (source)
  • While the moon followed its prescribed path across the high mountain valley glistening like crystal below, he would read, pursue his study of organized matter, of the characteristics of protoplasm, that self-sustaining, delicate substance that hovers intriguingly between synthesis and dissolution and whose basic forms have remained the same as when it first assumed rudimentary shape.†   (source)
  • After having been treated by Joachim so coolly—indeed, Hans Castorp sensed something of a gentle hostility in good Joachim's attitude toward their fellow patient, a hostility that made him smile despite his own inner turmoil—"Clavdia" tried pacing the room; but there was not enough space for that, and so she, too, picked up a magazine from the table and returned to her round chair with its rudimentary arms.†   (source)
  • He stood there bent down over the table, but with his head held to one side so that everyone could see that he had his eyes closed, and drew blindly with a pencil on the back side of a calling card; and without any help from his eyes, his massive hand traced an outline, the profile of a pig—more simplified and slightly idealized than realistic, but it was undoubtedly a rudimentary pig that he managed to assemble under such handicapped circumstances.†   (source)
  • Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis.†   (source)
  • The image hovered out there in space, remote and yet as near as his senses—it was a body: dull, whitish flesh, steaming, redolent, sticky; its skin blemished with natural defects, blotches, pimples, discolorations, cracks, and hard, scaly spots, and covered with the delicate currents and whorls of rudimentary, downy lanugo.†   (source)
  • She, impending disaster itself, walked about with gathered shadow at the eyes and the rudimentary muscles of savagery fixing the hard lines of her mouth.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER I DESCRIPTION OF FARMER OAK—AN INCIDENT When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.†   (source)
  • It affected him as the ignorance of a companion, otherwise without reproach, touching some rudimentary branch of learning would have done.†   (source)
  • If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper.†   (source)
  • Two or three times, even, to the great astonishment of his friends, he had, when Aramis allowed some rudimental error to escape him, replaced a verb in its right tense and a noun in its case.†   (source)
  • I no longer adhere to my intention of giving with my own mouth rudimentary education to the lowest class.†   (source)
  • Instead of rudimentary trilobites, I noticed remains of a more perfect order of beings, amongst others ganoid fishes and some of those sauroids in which palaeontologists have discovered the earliest reptile forms.†   (source)
  • It was naturally of the essence that the young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary—or was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned.†   (source)
  • …faded away; and the picture we are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the…†   (source)
  • Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet.†   (source)
  • "In the first place, because vertical currents, which are caused by differences in the water's salinity and density, can produce enough motion to sustain the rudimentary lifestyles of sea lilies and starfish."†   (source)
  • They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation.†   (source)
  • Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.†   (source)
  • The whole meager flora of this region consisted of certain microscopic buds, rudimentary diatoms made up of a type of cell positioned between two quartz–rich shells, plus long purple and crimson fucus plants, buoyed by small air bladders and washed up on the coast by the surf.†   (source)
  • Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision.†   (source)
  • No born gentleman, no-one with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct.†   (source)
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