Less/fewer with unit nouns, such as dollars or gallons

[vishalc581]

Hi,

I was studying modifiers today and I didn't understand the usage of LESS with UNIT NOUNS as explained in the MGMAT SC guide. Can you please explain the below with example in detail.


Be careful with unit nouns, such as dollars or gallons. By their nature, unit nouns are countable: one
dollar, two dollars, three dollars. Thus, they work with most of the countable modifiers.

However, unit nouns represent uncountable quantities: money, volume. (You can count money, of course, but you cannot
count the noun money: one money (?), two moneys (?), stop.) As a result, we use less with unit nouns,
when we really want to indicate something about the underlying quantity.


Right: We have LESS THAN twenty dollars.

[tim]

I don't understand what you're asking here. You requested examples, then you proceeded to provide perfect examples yourself.

[abhisheks901]

sc guide 6th edition page 70

we have less than 20 dollars means that the amount of money is less than 20 dollars, it may be 17 or 15 or 19 dollars.

when i say " we have FEWER THAN 20 dollars" then I am confused what does it mean?

Does it mean that I may have amount of money more than 20 dollars like 30 or 40 dollars, but the value of a single currency note will be less than 20 dollars, like 5 notes of 10 dollars??

Thanks

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

There's a nice answer to this in the book:
If you write We have FEWER THAN twenty dollars, you would mean the actual pieces of paper. (You would probably say fewer than twenty dollar bills to make the point even clearer.)
The point is that money, being a continuous spectrum, is considered uncountable and is therefore combined with the words 'much', and 'less'. As soon as you say 'fewer' or 'many', then you're implying that you have a countable noun, such as the dollar bills.

[abhisheks901]

Ok, so do you mean that "less than 20 dollars" and "fewer than 20 dollars bills" are one and same thing?

thanks

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Please don't quote the whole post in your reply - the forums will be very cluttered if you do that.

No, I don't mean that they are the same thing. They are answers to different questions:
How much money do you have? - I have less than 20 dollars.
How many dollar bills do you have? - I have fewer than 20 dollar bills.