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Staying in a hotel costs ____ renting a room in a dormitory for a week.
A. twice more than
B. twice as much as
C. as much twice as
D. as much as twice
Note: If A. is used, can you please correct the sentence with minimal and necessary changes?
Here is my attempt:
Staying in a hotel costs twice more than THAT OF renting a room in a dormitory for a week.A earns twice as much as B.
Which of the following situations fit the description?
A. A earns 100 per month and B earns 250.
B. A earns 100 per month and B earns 350.
C. A earns 100.00 per month and B earns 200.00
My question is: If only C. fits the description, wouldn’t the expression “as much as” have very limited practical use?
28 mrt. 2013 02:44
Antwoorden · 4
3
For your first answer, B is correct. IF you wanted to use A, you'd have to change the actual answer segment to be "two times more than". Why? It's an odd thing to explain. "Twice" is treated differently than "two times", even though they mean the same thing. This goes for any other variation (i.e. "thrice/three times", "tenfold/ten times", etc.).
Basically, if "times" is used, you go with "more", while "-ice" goes with "as much as". My best guess for why this is as it is is because "X times" is actually similar to a noun in this situation, and it follows the same grammar rules as saying "three more than I had before" or "five less than the maximum". Numerals are weird like that, in that their placement in sentences is very much "noun-like" even though they typically aren't considered to be nouns. With "X times", it's more clear; the "times" is the noun-like word, with the "X" modifying it. In fact, I believe the term for such a thing is a predeterminer.
"Twice/thrice/tenfold/twentyfold/etc.", on the other hand, are adverbs, and they are modified with the preposition "as much as". They can't go with "more" because "more" is a determiner that deals with numerical superiority (and therefore with nouns/predeterminers). The opposite is not necessarily true: "three times as much as" can work, because now "three times" is being treated as an adverb; its role in the sentence changes depending on whether it goes with a preposition or a determiner.
______________________________
To make this more simple, if you've got "times" in your sentence to describe a difference in numbers, then it goes with "more" OR "as much as", but "more" is more common. If you've got one of the adverb variants (like "twice"), then it goes with "as much as" only, because it's always an adverb.
28 maart 2013
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Taalvaardigheden
Chinees (Mandarijn), Engels
Taal die wordt geleerd
Engels
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