hi there welcome to Harry's world of words and phrases and English in a
minute today we're looking at the English words much and many and when we
talk about much and many we have to understand the difference between
countable and uncountable nouns so what do they mean so let's look at those
first of all countable means something that has a natural plural for example
Apple apples orange oranges car cars and uncountable is where they don't have a
natural plural so this one word is for the single and the plural for example
tea we don't say teas coffee we don't say coffees petrol we don't say petrels
rice we don't say Rice's and so on okay so as always rice in the single rice in
the plural petrol in the single petrol in the plural so when we're using much
and many we use one with countable and the other with uncountable so when we're
talking about much we use it with uncountable how much rice do you have
how much petrol do you want and when we're using many we use it with
countable how many apples have you got how many cars have you got how many
oranges do you want and another rule and just be very careful with this when we
use much and many we normally use those words when we're asking questions like
how much or how many and we also use them in the negative I don't have much I
don't have many but we don't use them in the positive usually when we're talking
about positives we use the word a lot I have a lot of apples I have a lot of
petrol I have a lot of rice so when we use a lot we can use it with both
countable and uncountable so if you ever get stuck and you don't know whether to
use much of many always fall back to the default position of using a lot okay so
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