The phrase "a rather modest number" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a quantity that is not large or significant, often in a context where one might expect a larger figure.
Example: "The survey revealed a rather modest number of participants, indicating a need for better outreach."
Alternatives: "a fairly small number" or "a somewhat limited number".
And Greece's net international investment position — the difference between its overseas assets and liabilities — was negative, but only to the tune of 25 percent of GDP, a rather modest number: Yes, Greece was poor and relatively unproductive.
But even as Ms. Merkel said that she had come as a "good friend and a real partner," not a "taskmaster or teacher to give grades," the approximately 40,000 Greeks who took to the streets in protest (a rather modest number, by Greek standards) treated the visit as a provocation by the arch-nemesis in the euro crisis whose austerity medicine is obliterating the Greek middle class.
At the same time, a rather modest number of cytokinesis mutants in Chlamydomonas has been reported [ 25].
An assessment of their stability demonstrates a good to excellent robustness already at a rather modest number of 1,000 to 10,000 random samplings (see Additional file 1).
In any case, because of the rather modest number of informative transmissions (50 allelic transmissions among the 200 available for the 100 trios, and 17 allelic transmissions of the 76 available in the responsive group), our results should be interpreted with caution [ 27], the risk of chance finding being high.
O'Reilly grew up in a rather modest household in Nassau County, Long Island.
This optimum value is approximately 65%, which is a rather modest value for SOFC.
The 40 "world premieres" constitute a rather modest display of lowered expectations, from a vehicular standpoint.
He offered a rather modest suggestion: lower the proportion of interest payments that are deductible.
