Sentence check

Examples of the most common combinations.

Noncount: "butter"
Count: "book"

A star at the beginning of the word(s) means "Wrong!"

butter | *a butter | the butter | some butter

*book | a book | the book | *some book
books | *a books | the books | some books

Under special circumstances "a butter" and "some book" are possible, but if you are having trouble with this area of grammar, wait until you master the simpler combinations shown above before getting into the special cases.

Hello BMO

(1) If your sentence 1 is a general statement, i.e. not a statement about particular adults in a particular study of homosexual tendencies, you can also say:

‘Some adults exhibit homosexual tendencies at an early age.’ [‘At an early age’ or ‘from an early age’ is the more usual idiom in this context.]

(2) You could also say:

‘My family frowns on cohabitation outside marriage.’

(3) You could also say:

‘Too much parental control inhibits children's creativity.’

(4) The corrected version of the ‘tiger’ sentence isn’t quite correct. It should be:

‘Rampant logging has destroyed the Bengal tiger's habitat in South Asia.’

(5) Both versions of the ‘Taiwan’ sentence imply that the original inhabitants themselves (rather than their descendants) are still living in Taiwan. You could rephrase it like this:

‘The first inhabitants of Taiwan, whose descendants (known as the Natives) comprise less than 2% of the island's population, are believed to have migrated from islands south of Taiwan thousands of years before the Chinese settlers arrived.’

MrP

Finally, I will mention some ways to develop writing skill.

Hi,

No bragging intended here, but you did confuse me, and I have a degree in English.

The semantic relationship between the three parts of this sentence is not clear. The use of both 'but' and 'and' do not help. In fact, the sentence seems rather contradictory. It seems to suggest that being confused is something that might be interpreted as bragging. If you want to keep these words as much as possible, I'd simply rearrange the three parts:

You did confuse me, despite the fact that I have a degree in English, no bragging intended here. 

Please feel free to post again if you have any other queries. However, it's better to start a new thread for each new query.

Best wishes, Clive