| 词组 | amount |
| 释义 | amount 1. Amount, number. Many 20th-century commentators explain the difference between amount and number. The general rule seems first to have been stated in more or less contemporary terms by Vizetelly 1906: Amount is used of substances in mass; number refers to the individuals of which such mass is constituted. (Our only earlier commentator is Raub 1897, who handles the matter a little differently by discriminating amount, quantity, and number in a short synonymy paragraph.) Almost all modern commentators echo Vizetelly. They are partly right, but the flat distinction does not account for all standard usage. Number is regularly used with plural count nouns to indicate an indefinite number of individuals or items: • There were a number of serious (heavy) journalists —Michael Herr, Esquire, April 1970 • There is a number of misprints —Albert H. Smith, Notes and Queries, October 1966 • ... a number of forces in Western life —Vance Packard, The Sexual Wilderness, 1968 • ... a number of other schools —James B. Conant, Slums and Suburbs, 1961 • ... a number of activities government undertakes — New Republic, 21 June 1954 • There are ... a number of Arabic dialects —James T. Maher, The Lamp, Summer 1963 Amount is most frequently used with singular mass nouns: • Given a reasonable amount of prosperity —Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree, 1937 • ... the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition —T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," 1917 • ... it took a certain amount of faith —Hollis Alpert, Saturday Rev., 13 Nov. 1971 • ... the amount of independence they would like to have —Eulah C. Laucks, Center Mag., January 1968 • A considerable amount of misinformation exists regarding the temperatures of tropical countries — Preston E. James, Latin America, rev. ed., 1950 • ... losing ... a fair amount of their accent —N. Y. Times, 30 Nov. 1976 Lincoln Library 1924 insisted that amount could be used only of substances or material; the six examples above all demonstrate that the criticism was invalid. It seems to have arisen in Ayres 1881, who was offended by the phrase amount of perfection. The insistence on substance or material is now a dead issue. Of course, amount is used of material mass nouns too: • But the lion would certainly come down to the plain with the amount of game that was here now —Ernest Hemingway, "Miss Mary's Lion," 1956 • ... spent any amount of money on him —Times Literary Supp., 20 Feb. 1969 • ... the amount of snow that we usually have —Richard Joseph, Your Trip to Britain, 1954 • Alexander added to his heavy troops archers, sling-ers, and javelin men, and a certain amount of cavalry —Tom Wintringham, The Story of Weapons and Tactics, 1943 Amount is also used with plural count nouns when they are thought of as an aggregate: • ... who wrote the U.N. that he'd be glad to furnish any amount of black pebbles —New Yorker, 20 Sept. 1952 • ... the high amount of taxes —Harper's Weekly, 29 Sept. 1975 • Surely twelve men, whose eyes were opened, having the knowledge of the Most High, were better than any amount of lecturers —Richard M. Benson, An Exposition of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, 1898 • There have been 110,000 American casualties—one third the amount in World War I —N Y. Times, 22 June 1952 • ... we could absorb a vast amount of South American products —Thurman W. Arnold, The Bottlenecks of Business, 1940 • One of the minor mysteries of modern life is the large amount of police cars with flashing lights and sirens —Alan Coren, Punch, 15 July 1975 • ... an Eighth Avenue saloon that had become known affectionately as the Tavern of the Bite, in deference to the unique amount of worthless IOUs collected during each day's business —Robert Lewis Taylor, New Yorker, 12 Nov. 1955 • ... brunets possess a great amount of the substances required for the production of pigment —Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 2d ed., 1945 • ... every professional activity requires a fixed amount of calories —Psychological Abstracts, April 1947 • This less common use of amount is sometimes criticized, but the critics bring forward no cogent reason for condemning it, only the condemnation itself. Colter 1981 says this: "When 'amount' is used with plurals— the amount of people—it sounds plain dumb." Most other commentators, such as Bernstein 1965, Shaw 1970, and many handbooks, merely state the distinction. The use is well established in general prose. 2. Flesch 1964 finds the phrase in the amount of wordy and suggests replacing it with of or for. Such a revision may work in some contexts, but in the example below such a substitution would make nonsense. • The Cuban trade balance with the United States for the first three quarters of 1943 was favourable in the amount of $103,518,000 —Britannica Book of the Year 1944 The phrases in the amount of and more often to the amount of are used with large amounts of money and are not always easily omissible or replaceable: • ... had supported the Choral Masterworks Series of 1952 to the amount of $40,000 —Current Biography, July 1966 3. The verb amount is regularly followed by to: • Probably the population never amounted to more than a few hundred souls —Jacquetta & Christopher Hawkes, Prehistoric Britain, 1949 • ... a cumulative cheerfulness, which soon amounted to delight —Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, 1878 • And according to my uncle, the scrapes he was always getting into didn't really amount to much — Peter Taylor, The Old Forest and Other Stories, 1985 |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。