During the 18th century, no fewer than three inspectors devoted their efforts to it.
They devoted their efforts to blurring their differences and appropriating each other's issues.
The soldiers who had been brought in to restore order devoted their efforts to roasting pigeons and looting homes.
As a result, many of the late 19th-century economists devoted their efforts to the problem of how resources are allocated under conditions of perfect competition.
Instead they devoted their efforts to showing that, even if everything is physical, mental organisation can yet comprise its own level of reality.
Instead, Japanese poets devoted their efforts to perfecting each syllable of their compositions, expanding the content of a tanka by suggestion and allusion, and prizing shadings of tone and diction more than originality or boldness of expression.
Until now, AmeriCorps volunteers have generally devoted their efforts to helping the underprivileged, the sort of community service that today's high school and college kids do at such phenomenal rates.
It would be far better if scientists devoted their efforts towards helping policy-makers devise ways of reducing emissions strongly and effectively, without reducing living standards or undermining poverty reduction around the world, instead of complaining about what they perceive to be the weaknesses of the strong international agreement on climate change that was achieved in Paris.
The Islamic revival, and its attendant struggles and ills, is less like the eighteenth century in Europe than like the sixteenth, the age of Luther, when the most sensitive and ambitious Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans devoted their efforts to finding in the words of the Bible a meaning for which they were prepared to live and die.
