Number
From Teflpedia
- Disambiguation: see grammatical number.
Numbers in English come in two flavours:
- cardinal numbers; one, two, three, four, five etc
- ordinal numbers: first, second third, fourth, fifth, etc
- hundred, thousand,
Others:
- 12 is a dozen
- 20 is a score.
- We say 99.94 is "ninety-nine point nine four"
Note Americans tend to say "one hundred thirty two" rather than "one hundred and thirty two"
1 billion used to be 1,000,000,000,000, but the Americans changed it to be merely 1,000,000,000. But they haven't told the Europeans, where 1,000,000,000 is a milliard (or similar).
Europeans often use different number separators so that "1,234.5" or "1 234.5" is written as "1.234,5"[1]
Students often need to practise thinking of numbers in English, as they will naturally default back to L1 thinking when reading numbers.
