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From: Chris Croughton <chris@keristor.net>
Newsgroups: alt.languages.english
Subject: Re: "as many as" usage!
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 21:19:36 +0000
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On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:06:19 -0500, Someonekicked
<someonekicked@comcast.net> wrote:
> I guess its an ESL issue, Im taking the GRE, and one question in the
> quantitative part was:
>
> "twice as many boys as girls earned ..."
>
> I interpreted it as the number of girls is twice the number of boys, but it
> turns out it is the other way around!
Indeed it is. It's a very common idiom, "I have eaten twice as many
apples as my brother".
> I tried to search online (google) for some tutorial for "as many as", but
> found none; do you have any links for such tutorial? or if anyone can help
> explaining how "as many as" can be used in different situations, and what it
> means every time, it is very confusing to me.
It always means a ratio between the first and the second, in that order.
If you have twice as many A as B then the number of A divided by the
number of B is 2. If the number is left out then it's equal ("there
were as many boys as girls" means that the numbers of each were the
same; "about" can be used to give some fuzziness or approximation,
"almost" to mean that the number of A was not quite as large as stated).
I can't think of any exceptions the way you interpreted it.
Chris C
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