ความคิดเห็นที่ 8
 
ขอโทษที่ตอบเป็นภาษาอังกฤษล้วนนะ วันนี้ขี้เกียดพิมพ์ภาษาไทย
1. About using the aritcle "the" , which makes me confused in some usages. When would we have it ? Like in these sentences.
The amount of (the) RAM I have is about 2GB.
I think in this sentence we should discard the "the" because we do not specific what kind of ram it is, is this correct ?
***Both are correct, but 'amount of something' is much more common than 'amount of the something'. The examples I could find for 'amount of the something' are:
something=referring to something that represents a number such as budget, surplus, bill, etc
something=something being emphasized
You can compare yourself at one of the BEST free resources on the internet for discovering how words and phrases are used:
http://www.americancorpus.org/
If you want British English, you could try:
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
But it provides less information
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2.What kind of construction do you think it's the biggest in the world ?
2.1 The pyramid
2.2. (The) pyramids
Which one of the above choices should we answer to the question ?
Which type of word, singular or plural, should we use to answer when we refer to a non-specific object ?
***This is a big problem with teaching and learning 'the' and 'a' and '0' (no article). Most people teach it and learn it as you describe above, but it's not really correct.
To be honest, there is no perfect description or set of rules for using these short words (which are also the most common words in English), but there is one way to think about them that can help:
the = indicates that the thing you are talking about should be 'shared knowledge' between you and the speaker.
So in your question number 1, if you are just telling someone about the RAM in your computer, it's probably not shared knowledge. But if you bought the computer from someone, and he said there were 4 GB inside, and you found that there's only 2, you might argue about it. Probably you wouldn't use 'the' because it's not common after 'amount of' but you COULD say a sentence such as: "The reason I bought this computer is because of the amount of the RAM! Don't try to cheat me!". It would not be incorrect, but it would be uncommon.
In question two, you MUST be referring to THE pyramids in Egypt, and that should be knowledge shared by your conversation partner. If you just said 'pyramids', your partner might be confused because he might know of THE pyramids, which everyone knows are quite large, but since you answered 'pyramids', you are not emphasizing that the pyramids you are talking about should be the pyramids that he knows about.
So THE pyramids must be correct if you are talking about the ones in Egypt.
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3. How do we use the word "some" before a singular noun ? For instance,
Is there "some" case that we can reach to the moon without taking a spaceship ?
***I think you need to look beyond 'singular' and 'plural' and think about 'abstract' and 'concrete'. If you look for 'is there some' in the American Corpus, you will find that almost all of the things after that phrase are abstract nouns IN WRITTEN ENGLISH.
However, you look carefully, you will see that sometimes English speakers SAY 'is there some (countable noun)' which has the same meaning as 'is there A (countable noun)'. Of course it means an unspecified noun.
In your example, it would be more common to say "is there some way we could...' or possibly "is there some case where we could..."
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Sorry Khun Horm, I just meant that you shouldn't tell someone that you don't have any experience when you are applying for a job because then you won't get the job!
จากคุณ :
ไมค์ (bobocat) 
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11 มี.ค. 52 16:40:23
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