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Informations, Advices, Peoples: The Nouns That Refuse to Take an S

VoyaLang Team
5 min read
GRAMMAR

Informations, Advices, Peoples: The Nouns That Refuse to Take an S

VOYALANG.COM/BLOG5 MIN READ

English is being difficult on purpose

"I have two informations for you." In most languages that sentence is perfectly normal. In English the word simply refuses to take an s, and there is no rule you can work out from meaning, because you can obviously have two pieces of information. It is just how the word behaves. The good news is that the list is short, these words repeat in almost every IELTS topic, and once you learn them the error disappears for good.

The list: these never take an s

information, advice, news, knowledge, research, evidence
equipment, furniture, luggage, machinery
money, work, homework, housework, transport, traffic
progress, damage, pollution, weather, behavior, education
food words: bread, rice, water, coffee, advice on all of them

5 fixes you will use in every essay

Informations
Students can find many informations on the internet.
Students can find a lot of information on the internet.
Many needs something countable, so it cannot go with information either. Use a lot of, much, or some. This pair of errors travels together, and fixing one fixes both.
Advices
My teacher gave me three advices.
My teacher gave me three pieces of advice.
When you genuinely need to count one of these words, use a counter: a piece of advice, two pieces of information, an item of furniture, a bit of progress.
Researches
Many researches show that sleep affects learning.
A great deal of research shows that sleep affects learning.
Research never becomes researches in normal English. If you want to count, say studies instead, which is countable: several studies show.
Peoples
Many peoples in my country thinks this is wrong.
Many people in my country think this is wrong.
People is already the plural, so it takes a plural verb: people are, people think. Peoples exists, but it means nations or ethnic groups, which is almost never what you meant.
The news are
The news are always about problems.
The news is always about problems.
News ends in s and is still singular. The same trap catches economics, mathematics and politics, which all take a singular verb.

3 words that go the other way

01
people is plural
People are, people have, people think. Never people is. This one appears in every essay you will ever write, so it is worth more than the rest of the list combined.
02
police is plural
The police are investigating, not the police is. If you need one officer, say a police officer.
03
news is singular
The news is bad. It looks plural because of the s, and it behaves as one thing. Same for economics and politics.

Why this small thing is worth learning properly

Look at the list again and notice where those words live: education, technology, work, city life, the environment. Those are exactly the topics IELTS keeps setting. So this is not one mistake that happens once. It is one habit that repeats five or six times on a single page, and each repeat counts against your accuracy. Ten minutes on this list is one of the best trades in the whole exam.

More grammar with a real effect on your score: a, an, the: the three smallest words that cost the most marks and one comma cannot hold two sentences.

See how often you actually do it

Nobody believes they make this mistake five times in one essay, and most people do. Write your next essay in VoyaLang and look at the correction list. Every countable slip is marked in the sentence you wrote it in, so you can count them yourself and watch the number fall over the next few essays. Create a free account and check your next one in about a minute.

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