Adjectives and adverbs help please.?

We are concerned (a) with only, (b) only with your welfare and happiness. (The sentence can not be changed around. It's either a or b. Please tell me why you would change it around and what only modifies to make it correct.





Because of excessive costs, designer Donna Karan made (a) less, (b) fewer trips to the Far East and Africa in search of "creative inspiratation." My book says fewer refers to countable items. less refers to amounts and quantities. You can count the trips can't you? If you counted them they would be fewer. But maybe it's amounts because their talking about the amounts of times she went.


Is their a trick to figuring it out?





Do you prefer (a) a 24, 36, or 48 month loan, (b) a 24-, 36-, or 48-month loan? And why?|||"We are only concerned with your welfare and happiness". A and B are both horrid grammatical choices, but I think B is the best option, if you must go with one.





"Because of excessive costs..." Option B, because when you're dealing with a quantifiable number of things, rather than a measurement, you use fewer rather than less. Less milk, fewer cookies -- get it? You're right about the logic -- your ability to count them makes "fewer" the best option.





I'm not sure about the last one, honestly. I believe there's no steadfast technically-correct answer. It's a matter of your preference with how the sentence will look on paper.|||b.b.a|||For the first sentence, I prefer A if there are no other issues. The sender is expressing concern for the customer. Option B implies there are other issues or concerns that can't be solved or addressed at the time (we're only concerned with your welfare and happiness, and we can't fix your leaky pipes or get you a return ticket from Fort Branchtree or whatever).





For sentence 2, my hunch would be "fewer" and it's because of a grammar lesson from junior high school English class. The way we learned it was, "less" refers to one or two things (Bill had 5 toys or trips to the doctor or anything else, Anne had 3, but I had less than 2), whereas "fewer" meant three or more (Jeannette had fewer mistakes, six in all, than anyone else did on the test, except Greg). Another wrinkle is that the phrase "less than" can always be used in the mathematical sense: 56 is less than 186, for example..





I prefer the dashes for the last example. One reason is that someone could say something like, "Well, these are for 24 one month loans" and I wouldn't be surprised if a sharpie tried to do that. When the dashes are in place, just like a 24-hour day, but eight hours per day for work; a 15-minute break during the five day work week; a 30-day loan due in 90 days--get the idea? I think it's when the numbers are linked to a word or a noun that you use the dash, otherwise no. Again, that's from the old school and I don't know how they're doing it these days.





Very good question!