The Communicative Grammar of English Workbook - Edward Woods, Rudy Coppieters 2002
4.1. Count and non-count nouns
Unit four. Determiners
Sections 57-69; 510; 597-601
Count nouns are so called because they can be counted individually, e.g. house, pen, etc.
Non-count nouns refer to things which cannot be counted individually, e.g. water, wood, etc.
Group nouns refer to a set or collection of count nouns, e.g. a set of tools.
Unit nouns subdivide non-count nouns into separate pieces, e.g. a piece of paper.
Task one **
Match the group nouns in column A with the objects in column B, e.g. a gang of thieves
Task two **
Match the unit nouns in column A with the appropriate objects in column B, e.g. a bowl of rice
Task three **
Decide which of the following are count nouns and which are non-count nouns. There are some which can be either. So make three columns.
Task four **
Complete the following texts with an appropriate group or unit noun.
1. The room was a mess. There was a (1) of paper on the floor, some empty (2) of wine by the desk and (3) of food scattered all over the room.
2. The picture shows a (4) of sheep sheltering from the storm by a (5) of trees. In the distance the storm is clearing and the sun is shining through a (6) of clouds.
3. “Tea or coffee?”
“Oh, a (7) of tea, please.”
“And a (8) of cake?
“No, thank you.”
4. Foot and mouth disease has meant that (9) of cattle and many (10) of sheep have had to be destroyed. This is especially so in the Lake District in the north-west of England. Many farmers have seen years of hard work destroyed overnight.
Task five **
Complete the text by selecting an appropriate noun from those below. Decide whether it should be singular or plural and whether the verb in brackets should be singular or plural.
advice, education, engineer, experience, help, information, language, management, method, situation, skill, transportation, variety, weather, work
The (1) we have at the moment (2. Be) very unclear. We know that the (3) that (4. Need) to be done will require a (5) of (6) which (7. Need) to come from many sources. We require (8) who (9. Have) worked in developing countries, people with (10) skills and people with (11) in (12).
The (13) for recruiting we have received (14. Have) so far been of little (15). It goes without saying that working in developing countries requires people who are able to take on board cultural differences and accept (16) that often (17. Seem) bizarre.
For our part, we must be able to tell people:
What the (18) (19. Be) like. How the seasons are defined.
What (20) (21. Be) like, road, rail and telephone.
What the level of (22) (23. Be), so we can use the appropriate teaching (24).
(adapted from memo on recruiting for World Bank contracts in Indonesia)
Task six **
Read through the following paragraphs and decide whether the nouns are countable or uncountable as they are used. Then make a list of those that can be used as both.
Vienna feeds upon its past, a fond and sustaining diet, varied with chocolate cake or boiled beef with potatoes (Franz Josef’s favourite dish), washed down with the young white wine of the Vienna Woods, digested and re-digested, and ordered once more, over, and over, and over again ... If it reminds me sometimes of Beijing, sometimes it suggests to me the sensations of apartheid in South Africa. The city is obsessed and obsessive. Every conversation returns to its lost greatness, every reference somehow finds its way to questions of rank, or status, or historical influence. Viennese romantics still love to wallow in the tragic story of Crown Prince Rudolf and his eighteen-year-old mistress Marie Vetsera, ’the little Baroness’, who died apparently in a suicide pact in the country house of Mayerling in 1889. The tale precisely fits the popular predilections of the city, being snobbish, nostalgic, maudlin and rather cheap. I went out one Sunday to visit the grave of the little Baroness, who was buried obscurely in a village churchyard by the command of Franz Josef, and was just in time to hear a Viennese lady of a certain age explaining the affair to her American guests. ’But in any case,’ I heard her say without a trace of irony, ’in any case, she was only the daughter of a bourgeois.’
I often saw that same lady waiting for a tram, for she is a familiar of Vienna. She often wears a brown tweed suit, and is rather tightly clamped around the middle, and pearled very likely, and she never seems to be encumbranced, as most of us sometimes are, with shopping bags, umbrellas or toasters she has just picked up from the electrician’s. If you smile at her, she responds with a frosty stare, as though she suspects you might put ketchup on your Tafelspitz, but if you speak to her she lights up with a flowery charm. Inextricably linked with the social absurdity of Vienna is its famous Gemutlichkeit, its ordered cosiness, which is enough to make a Welsh anarchist’s flesh creep: the one goes with the other, and just as it made the people of old Vienna one and all the children of their kind father His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty, still to this day it seems to fix the attitudes of this city as with a scented glue - sweetly if synthetically scented, like flavours you sometimes taste upon licking the adhesives of American envelopes.
(Jan Morris, Among the Cities, Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 383-384)