1.  Cook was making fresh cornbread rolls for breakfast and lesser mortals were hard at it with brooms and mops.

2.  He was hard at work on the translation of a play which had to be ready two days later.

3.  Sarah was hard at it on her computer.

4.  Thacker had set him a spot of overtime and he was hard at it in the mill.

5.  The bleary-eyed engineers were still hard at work when everyone else arrived the next day.

6.  Today, all eight of the Van Andel and DeVos offspring are hard at work making this company better.

7.  The salvage teams are already hard at work trying to deal with the spilled oil.

8.  It was hard at first to differentiate between the two styles of music.

9.  For John it was hard at that moment to remember the calm imperatives of economic law.