General English Level 1 V 3

UNIT 03 Spending money TOPIC 01 What do you spend your money on?

	LANGUAGE FOCUS 08 Countable and uncountable nouns

Julia says:
	We have some green curry paste and coconut milk, but we only have three mushrooms .
	Could you also buy a cabbage and four onions ?

1 cabbage

3 mushrooms

4 onions

We can count mushrooms, cabbages and onions - one, two, three, four …

Mushroom, cabbage and onion are countable nouns.

Julia says:
	We have some green curry paste and coconut milk...
	How about some chocolate ice cream?

Oil

Rice

Ice cream

We cannot count rice, oil or ice cream.

Rice, oil and ice cream are uncountable nouns.

Countable	Uncountable
mushroom onion cabbage	beef rice oil green curry paste coconut milk ice cream

We ask: Do we have any mushrooms? We answer: Yes, we have some mushrooms. Yes, we have three mushrooms. No, we don't have any mushrooms.	We ask: Do we have any rice? We answer: Yes, we have some rice. No, we don't have any rice.

We ask: How many mushrooms do we have? We answer: We have three mushrooms. We have a lot of mushrooms. We do n't have many mushrooms.	We ask: How much oil do we have? We answer: We have a lot of oil. We have some oil. We don't have much oil.

Examples

1	Read the sentences.
2	Click on each sentence to listen.
3	Practise saying each sentence.

We can't count oil, but we can count bottles/ litres of oil.

We have some oil
We have a bottle of oil.
We have a litre of oil.

We can't count rice but we can count bags/ kilos of rice.

We have some rice.
We have a bag of rice.
We have a kilo of rice.

We ask, "Do we have any oil?" But note: "Can you buy some oil?"
We ask, "Do we have any tea?" But note: "Would you like some tea?"

Now go to 09 PRACTICE Countable and uncountable nouns - part 1.