The phrase "a very modest number" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a quantity that is considered small or insignificant in comparison to other numbers or expectations.
Example: "The survey revealed a very modest number of participants, which was surprising given the interest in the topic."
Alternatives: "a rather small figure" or "a fairly low amount".
The ensemble has been scheduled for just three concerts this season -- a very modest number for a resident ensemble -- but the first of these three takes place tonight.
In 1971, I arrived one evening in Montreal to see a production of my play Total Eclipse, about Rimbaud and Verlaine, and left the next morning, after parting with what seems in retrospect a very modest number of Canadian dollars, with a pounding hangover and the lithograph under my arm.
Probably only about 14,000 people [from a population of more than 10 million] will put something in a ballot box … That may sound like a very modest number, and it is, but the last electoral process … involved just 135 people – men, elders choosing up to 275 members of parliament," Keating said.
She won, of course, for her role in 'The Reader' but was also nominated for her husband Sam Mendes's film Revolutionary Road (again in the best actress category), for which she apparently received a very modest number of votes from the academy.
The construction figure is "a very modest number" considering how many California institutions are doing this kind of research, says Kriegstein.
Creating another leg in its strategic forces -- alongside a very modest number of nuclear-tipped ICBMs -- represents a potential game-changer, but only if China has a home for these subs and a way for them to roam the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Lack of sequence data and a reliance on techniques with a definably narrow expectation of success such as degenerate PCR have contributed to the very modest number of GPCRs thus far identified or characterized [ 4- 9] in this phylum.
That is a more important signal of the continuing buildup than is the insertion of troops to work with the Northern Alliance, which Mr. Rumsfeld called the "very modest number of ground troops in the country.
He said: "The very modest number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to work in Britain this year is in stark contrast to the inflammatory rhetoric of earlier this year".
Mb and Mt were considered as a set because they showed very modest numbers of differences in their DNA methylation between each other, compared with their differences from nonmuscle cell cultures.
The very modest numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to work in Britain this year is in stark contrast to the inflammatory rhetoric of earlier this year.
