4GA. Adjectives & Determiners Grammar Activities

Take a look at these memes and note the spelling errors.

A. Here is a comparative. I am smarter than you.

B. What is the easyest way of getting an A?

C. We are more smarter than humans. Except if we smell catnip.

D. I need a largeer room

E. My parents say there are biger problems in my life than my acnes.

Rules:

A. Do not use a definite article with the names of single mountains.

B. Do not use a definite article with sports when they are the object of ‘play’.

C. Do not use a definite article with most diseases.

D. Use a definite article with the names of mountain ranges.

E. A definite article is optional with instruments when they are the object of ‘play’.

F. Using an indefinite article with a mass noun makes it a count noun.

G. Do not use a definite article with proper names of people.

Read this first part of the article “California’s largest reservoirs at critically low levels – signaling a dry summer ahead” by Maanvi Singh from The Guardian, June 24, 2022

Watch the Ted Talk named “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. After watching, answer questions about adjectives and determiners in the following clips:

a. (03:31) Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

b. (05:54) If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.

c. (08:42) I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.

a. Find a poem or the lyrics to a favorite song and choose a snippet of 50-60 words. Analyze all the adjectives in the text and give yourself the following points.

• 1 point for each adjective
• 2 points for each attributive adjective
• 3 points for each comparative form
• 4 points for each superlative form
• 5 points for each non-gradable form

Using the same text, analyze the determiners in the text and give yourself the following points.

• 1 point for every determiner
• 2 points for every definite article
• 3 points for every quantifier
• 4 points for every demonstrative determiner
• 5 points for every possessive determiner

Compare with classmates and discuss whose/which texts had the highest and lowest scores for each, and whose combined score was the highest.

b. Come up with nicknames for 4 characters in a story that use adjectives. Invent backstories for how they got them, and explain why they like or dislike their nicknames.

c. Think of a product and come up with 50-word spoken advertising copy that could be read on a podcast to sell it, using adjectives and hyperbole. Then try re-writing the copy to use no adjectives at all.