Day Three - The English Version of What you Need to Know on Some Quantifiers Usage

a little / a few and little /few

•      a little /little are used before uncountable nouns:

     a little salt/little salt

•      a few/few are used before plural nouns:

     a few people/few people

     a little is a small amount, or what the speaker considers a small amount.
     a few is a small number, or what the speaker considers a small number.

• only placed before a little/a few emphasizes that the number or amount really is small in the speaker's opinion:

     Only a few of our customers have accounts.

• But quite before a few increases the number considerably:

     I have quite a few books on art. (= quite a lot of books)

• little and few denote scarcity or lack and have almost the force of a negative:

     There was little time for consultation.
     Little is known about the side effects of this drug.
     Few towns have such splendid trees.

• This use of little and few is mainly confined to written English (probably because in conversation little and few might easily be mistaken for a little/a few). In conversation, therefore, little and few are normally replaced by hardly any. A negative verb + much/many is also possible:

     We saw little = We saw hardly anything/We didn't see much.
     Tourists come here but few stay overnight =
     Tourists come here but hardly any stay overnight.

• a lot of/lots of are used before both countable and uncountable nouns to mean a non defined number or amount, that is, they carry the meaning of much and many:

     I eat lots of/a lot of apples every day.
     Our children had lots of/ a lot of fruit yesterday afternoon.
     I've got a lot of/ lots of work to do.

Now, considering the examples on the map from Day Two, answer the following exercises.

Try them first, then go to the key at

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