Page 122 - DENG101_Communication Skills-I

Unit 11: Articles, Nouns, Adjectives and Adverbs

We can use a few and many with countable nouns: Notes

Examples: 1. I’ve got a few notes.
2. I haven’t got many pencils.

Notes “People” is countable.
“People” is the plural of “person”.

We can count people:

Examples: 1. There is one person here.
2. There are three people here.

11.2.2 Uncountable Nouns

Uncountable nouns are substances, concepts, etc. that we cannot divide into separate elements.
We cannot “count” them.

Example: “milk”.

We can count “bottles of milk” or “litres of milk”, but we cannot count “milk” itself.
Here are some more examples of uncountable nouns:
1. Music, art, love, happiness
2. Advice, information, news
3. Furniture, luggage

4. Rice, sugar, butter, water
5. Electricity, gas, power
6. Money, currency
We usually treat uncountable nouns as singular. We use a singular verb.

Examples: 1. This news is very important.
2. Your luggage looks heavy.
We do not usually use the indefi nite article a/an with uncountable nouns. We cannot say “an
information” or “a music”. But we can say a something of:

Examples: 1. A piece of news

2. A bottle of water
3. A grain of rice

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