Page 50 - Grasp English B1+ (Student Book)

4 Senses and Emotions

Grammar 1 Quantifiers

A. Read the passage and answer the questions.

I read about a woman who has only just discovered she has no sense of pain. It’s a bit of a mystery.
How did she not know? She’s had several accidents, lots of common injuries and two operations. In
both operations, she had only a small amount of anaesthetic and felt nothing when the doctors cut
into her skin. There have also been plenty of occasions when most people might have felt anxious or
afraid, but she has never felt these emotions. She doesn’t feel fear; she never worries and doesn’t have
much sense of danger. Not feeling pain is not always easy, though. She has burnt herself several times
when cooking. The only way she knows she has done this is when she smells burning flesh – her own!
Another time she fell over and knocked out her front teeth. After she had cleaned up the blood, she
continued shopping not even noticing she had two teeth missing until she got home and looked in a
mirror! There are not many people in the world who have no sense of pain – so far, only two have been
discovered – and doctors say the condition is related to a very rare genetic mutation.

1. What’s a bit of a mystery about this woman?

2. Why do you think she never realised that her sense of pain was missing?
3. Are there tons of people in the world with this condition?

B. Are the following sentences true for you?
1. Several people in my class speak three or more languages.
2. I’ve got tons of homework to do this evening.
3. If I’ve got a bit of free time this evening, I’ll probably play computer games.

C. Do we use the following quantifiers with countable nouns (C), uncountable nouns (U) or both (B)?

a bit of both each heaps of hundreds of
many much plenty of several tons of

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