Teach english new edition r

Collective nouns
Nouns which describe groups or organisations (e.g. ‘family’, ‘team’, ‘government’) are 
called 
collective
nouns. They can either be singular or plural depending on whether we 
are describing the unit or its members. We can say ‘The army 
are
advancing’ or ‘The army 
is
advancing’. This choice isn’t usually available in American English, however, where you 
would expect speakers to use singular verbs only.
Some collective nouns are form ed by making adjectives behave like nouns and in this 
case they are always plural, e.g. ‘The poor live in terrible conditions’, ‘The good die young’.
W hether a noun is countable, uncountable, plural or collective affects the construction of 
the sentences it occurs in. Uncountable nouns are used with singular verbs, and 
quantifiers
like ‘m uch’, ‘a lot o f’ and ‘some’. Countable nouns, on the other hand, are used with singular 
or plural verbs and with words like ‘m any’.
Compound nouns
We are used to nouns being one word. But English also has many com pound nouns, 
constructed from more than one word, e.g. ‘walking stick’, ‘cherry tree’, ‘town hall’, 
‘boyfriend’.
Not all com pound words are nouns, however. We can also have com pound adjectives, 
for example, ‘fair-skinned’, ‘neat-looking’.
Pronouns
There are three basic types of pronoun: personal pronouns, reflexive (personal) pronouns 
and relative pronouns.
Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’ and ‘they’ - and ‘it’ which isn’t really personal 
at all! Not only do they have these 
subject 
realisations, however, but they can be 
object
pronouns 
(‘me’, ‘you’, ‘him ’, ‘her’, ‘it’, ‘us’ and ‘them ’ in sentences like ‘I saw him ’), 
reflexive
pronouns 
(‘myself’, ‘yourself’, ‘him self’, ‘herself’, ‘itself’, ‘ourselves’, ‘yourselves’ and 
‘themselves’ in sentences like ‘I cut myself’), and