Countable and uncountable

A noun is a naming word. Some nouns can be counted: one banana, two bananas; one bus, three buses. These are countable nouns. On pages 32 and 33 of your book, Santoor, bananas, biscuits, chocolates, tomatoes, helmets, buses, cars and bicycles are all countable.

Some nouns cannot be counted one by one: water, rice, flour, curd, sugar, milk, coffee. These are uncountable nouns. They usually have no plural: we do not say 'two waters' or 'three rices'. Road words like traffic, pollution, speed, safety and fuel are uncountable too.

But we CAN count the things we keep them in, or small parts of them: drops of water, bottles of milk, bowls of rice, jars of coffee. So 'coffee' is uncountable, but 'coffee jars' are countable.

In the banana milkshake recipe in your book, 'two bananas' and 'ice cubes' can be counted, but 'milk', 'sugar' and 'honey' cannot.

A test: can you put a number in front of it? 'Two helmets' sounds right, so helmet is countable. 'Two traffics' does not, so traffic is uncountable.