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Count and noncount nouns exercises advanced full#

I want to eat lunch across the street while the committee are deliberating.Ī.

Count and noncount nouns exercises advanced full#

Unusual/creative uses of count nouns ( I slipped on the ice and got a face full of snowbank, where snowbank is normally a count noun).

Abstract Events ( I have three objections to your proposal / The marriage ceremony continued without any objection).

Food/Drink ( I’ll have another beer / She is drawn to the smell of beer).

Animals ( I saw a chicken / I bought some chicken).

Some nouns types commonly appear as either count or non-count, depending on the sense needed: To complicate things further, there are a few non-count nouns that represent things that are not so uniform when divided (such as luggage, laundry, equipment, underwear), but the simple test still works - they cannot be paired with a number like three. Non-native English-speakers beware: different languages may have different points - different “sizes” - at which a noun ceases being individual ( boy, apple) and becomes a substance ( water, corn).

Non-count nouns, then, can generally be reduced to insignificant amounts and retain their identity: blood, dirt, mercury, air, meat in some cases (like gold) we could subdivide quantities of the noun all the way down to the molecular level, while in others (like sand) we can’t go that far, but the individual parts are still really small. Many, many nouns can be used either way we can say The house was made of bricks or The house was made of brick and be equally correct, depending on whether we want to emphasize brick in its meaning as a construction material or as an individual object. You will have a number of count nouns, but an amount of non-count nouns. The simplest test, of course, is whether the noun in question can be paired with a cardinal number like one or seven we can say She asked for three forks, but not She asked for six silverware.

These nouns make an occasional appearance on the GMAT in Sentence Correction if correct usage were always obvious, it wouldn’t be on the test! While you can count any number of individual coins in your possession, you cannot have any real number of cashes similarly, you can go to the store to buy three shirts, or you can go to purchase clothing. Count nouns and non-count nouns (sometimes called “mass nouns”) are well-named: the former are countable entities, the latter are not.