The phrase "a surprising proportion" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing statistics or findings that reveal an unexpected amount or percentage of something.
Example: "In the recent survey, a surprising proportion of respondents indicated that they preferred remote work over in-office settings."
Alternatives: "an unexpected percentage" or "a notable fraction".
Yet a surprising proportion of those caring for older adults are younger.
But a surprising proportion of manufacturing firms in Britain are nothing like that.
Emmy winners, prominent academics and politicians, and MacArthur geniuses make up a surprising proportion of its tiny pool of alumni.
"A surprising proportion of people don't even take advantage of an offer of free service," he said.
When one learns to see through the figurative elaboration of Chavin designs a surprising proportion of them turn out to be representations of natural bird, animal, and human forms.
It's true, as Sandbrook points out, that many of the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire favored escalation of the war, and a surprising proportion of them voted in the general election for George Wallace.
"A very surprising proportion were in the North," said Mark Potok, a former senior fellow with the legal advocacy nonprofit group, reflecting on the flag's broad appeal.
When ships dock here from Antarctica and when daytrippers return after retracing Darwin's trip across the Beagle Channel a surprising high proportion of passengers utter the same words: "Let's go to the Irish pub!" The Dublin is no carbon copy from the motherland; instead it has a distinct local look – a shack-like structure, corrugated frontage (green, of course) and small-paned windows.
We discovered that a surprising large proportion of these genes were differentially expressed (75% at p<0.001 and 95% at p<0.05) (Table S3, Figure 5, S7 and S8).
Intron retention, a form of AS in which the mature mRNA transcript retains entire introns that are eliminated in other transcripts, accounts for a surprising large proportion (above 30%) of recorded AS events in Arabidopsis and rice [ 10].
For the likes of Rep. Paul Ryan, who is co-sponsoring a new fetal-personhood bill, it's a triumph of surprising proportions.
