Question

Identify the uncountable noun in the given sentence :
It took three years of research to gather information required to complete writing the book.
a) Research
b) Book
c) Three
d) Gather

Answer 1

Hint: Uncountable noun is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements.

Complete answer:
Any noun which cannot be counted is an uncountable noun. These nouns have no concept of singular and plural, although in English they take singular verb forms. For example so much water; so many chairs, etc.
Now, let us examine all the given options and find out the correct answer :
Option ‘a’ is Research. It is an abstract noun that is uncountable. You cannot count “research”. So, this is the correct option.
Option ‘b’ is Book. It is a concrete noun and is also countable. We can count the number of books, so it cannot be the correct option.
Option ‘c’ is Three. This is not a noun and is itself a number. It is an adjective, so we will eliminate it straight away.
Option ‘d’ is Gather. It is also not a noun but a verb. So, we will eliminate this option as well.
As we have examined all the given options, we can easily figure out the correct option. Here, the sentence is – It took three years of research to gather information required to complete writing the book. The uncountable noun in this sentence is “research”. So, the correct answer is “Option a”.

Note:
Many uncountable nouns can be converted to countable ones, which can then be used in their plural forms.