Question

Q1. Correct the grammatical mistakes in the following sentences.
1. No less than fifty men were injured in the accident.
2. He is the taller of the two brothers.
3. He would make a better engineer than a doctor.
4. I do not like such movies, which are immoral.
5. Poultry has given him great profit.

Answer 1

Check this link:
http://www.vu39.com/forum/eng101-english-comprehension/24083-eng101.html

Answer 2

still doubtful, if you know the answer by yourself please mention. I tried myself but I am confused whether what I am suppose to do in this question. Like, I have done this as:

More than fifty men were injured in the accident.
He is taller of the two brothers.
He would make better engineer than a doctor.
I do not like such movies which are immoral.
Poultry has given him great profits.

Now, what do you say?

Answer 3

I am not sure; that's why I googled it in the first place! ;) haha
However I think we do need the article The before both taller and two brothers.
In the fourth one, since not every movie is immoral, we need to use that instead of which; or we can simply rewrite it as I don't like such immoral movies and omit which.

Answer 4

That's sort of grammatical puzzle. Different answers by different people but no one is sure if his/her answer is correct.

Answer 5

That makes everyone an honest and open minded person! ;)
Why do you think it's better to use more instead of no less?

Answer 6

Don't know why I changed it, I guess I didn't like the sound of "No less"

Answer 7

Well, Google "No less than" and it will give you over 500,000,000 results!
When it says No less than fifty men were injured, it means that the number of injuries is fifty or more.
When we change it to more than, we ignore the possibility of the numbers to be equal to fifty. So it changes the meaning of the sentence.
I don't think the first one has any problem.
In the third one, I think for the same reason why you kept the article A before doctor, you should keep it before engineer as well.

Answer 8

In the first one, "no less than" is incorrect in this context.

Two words are used to denote the same thing: "less" and "fewer".

"Less" is for nouns which aren't "countable". eg, "He has less money than her".
"Fewer" is for countable nouns. eg, "He has fewer coins in his wallet".

So in this case, for (1), "fewer" is appropriate since the people are countable.

Whether or not something is "countable" can be poorly defined sometimes, and the rule can fall down. Here though, it applies cleanly. No need to change the meaning and emphasis of the sentence to avoid the problem! :)

Answer 9

Is population countable?

Answer 10

Here the Google dictionary uses the example "a population of less than 200,000".
http://goo.gl/BtnUP

Answer 11

"one population".. "two populations".. "three populations" - I'd say no, not in normal language anyway.

In the example you give, "population" isn't the noun in question, though. "people" is, so a form of the complete sentence would be "A population of less than 200,000 people". On that Google link, "less" is given as meaning "Fewer than". This is because the English language (as used informally, in "real life", not in papers and books) has evolved to almost exclusively use "less". It's therefore appropriate for a dictionary to include the definition, even if grammatical purists disagree with its use!

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less

Answer 12

@Parsa actually on second thoughts, I suppose that "fewer populations of bacteria existed in the control than in the experiment" is better than "less populations". So I'd say the noun is countable.

Answer 13

(in the rare situations where one would need to count populations!)

Answer 14

This is what I think:
1) is correct. No less than fifty men were injured in the accident means that at least fifty men were injured in the accident.

2) is correct. He is the taller of the two brothers. The articles "the" is needed in both cases, which tell us the person we are referring to.

3) need slight changes. He would make better engineer than a doctor. Why cant we re-frame this as He would do better as an engineer than a doctor.

4) need slight changes. I do not like such movies which are immoral. let remove such here because we are not listing items which we require "as". SO, I do not like movies, which are immoral. or I do not like immoral movies.

5) need slight changes. Poultry has given him great interest. We need to add business or work here, because poultry alone means birds e.g fowl kept. SO, Poultry business has given him great profits.

Answer 15

Ianre, I thought about adding the business too; but what about pottery for example?
Doesn't pottery mean both pots and pot-making?