They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own.他们乐意地容忍同他们相反的意见存在。
但是在实际使用中，contrary to X 往往成为一个副词短语，起修饰全句的作用，而不是修饰句中的某个名词成分。
And the decoding of the human genome, contrary to some early expectations, has not led to a burst of new drugs, at least not yet. (The New York Times, Nov. 27, 2007, F4)而人类基因谱的解码，同早期的预期相反，并没有导致新药物的大量出现，起码是尚未如此。
这种形容词短语改作为修饰整句的副词短语的现象，还见之于 based on, effective 等。