Other verbs can be used with this meaning too. Here’s a link to a concordance showing a range of verbs http://ske.li/it_is_thought – it looks like this:
Another link is https://ske.li/it_is_thought_that – this avoids use of ‘predicted that’ as it doesn’t fit in all situations. It looks like this:
Here’s a final link to instances which have been filtered so that they are all estimates/approximations – https://ske.li/approximated – which might be useful too for looking at different ways of expressing numbers (and hedging). It looks like this:
This link was created in response to the following student writing:
The teachers award a collective score to the group so it is complicated to isolate individual student scores.
“Complicated” is not an option that is found in this construction in standard academic English. Appropriate adjectives with this meaning that occur in it is * to can be found at the link https://ske.li/it_is_difficult_to, which looks like this:
This entry was created in response to a student writing:
It is vitally important of making sure that all
In fact, ensure is a stronger collocate here than make sure. The re-usable link is https://ske.li/ikg and looks like this:
Since this concordance is rather limited in use (although make sure/ensure collocates with important to), it seems helpful to expand it to show other possible verbs (though again important is the most common in BAWE) and following verbs. The re-usable link for this is https://ske.li/ikj and it looks like this:
