Noun Gender

Many common nouns, like “engineer” or “geologist”, can refer to men or women. Once, many English nouns would change form depending on their gender – for example, a man was called an "author" while a woman was called an “authoress” – but this use of gender-specific nouns is very rare today. Those that are still used occasionally tend to refer to occupational categories, as in the following sentences.

Abraham Werner was a very prominent eighteenth-century geologist.

Maria Ogilvie Gordon was at the height of her career as an Scottish geologist in the 1900s.

Noun Plurals

Most nouns change their form to indicate number by adding “-s” or “-es”, as illustrated in the following pairs of sentences:

Hydrocarbon accumulates in the traps around the outside of a salt plug.

Hydrocarbons migrate into any porous and permeable beds on both sides of the column of salt.

Geologist used to assume, quite naturally, that the continents always lay where they are now.

Geologists have estimated the durations of the eras, periods, and epochs from studies of radioactive minerals.

There are other nouns which form the plural by changing the last letter before adding “-s”. Some words ending in “-f” form the plural by deleting “-f” and adding “-ves”, and words ending in “-y” form the plural by deleting the “-y” and adding “-ies”, as in the following pairs of sentences:

The organic theory holds that oil and gas formed from the remains of plants and animals.

These theories have the advantages of explaining why petroleum deposits are often very deep.

If the noun ends in “-s”, “-es”, “-x”, “-sh”, “-ch”, “-tsch”, the plural is turned by adding – “-es” to the singular:

bus – buses brush – brushes

glass – glasses bench – benches

box – boxes match – matches

N. B. There are seven nouns which form the plural by changing the root vowel:

man – men goose – geese

woman – women mouse – mice

foot – feet louce – lice

tooth – teeth

There are two nouns which form the plural in “-en”:

ox – oxen child – children

In some nouns the plural form does not differ from the singular: deer, sheep, swine, fish, trout.

Some words borrowed from Latin or Greek keep their Latin or Greek plural forms, for instance, phenomenon, phenomena; datum, data; formula, formulae; index, indices; radius, radii.

Some of these nouns have acquired English plural forms: formulas, indexes, terminuses.

Thus in some cases two plural forms are preserved.

6. Write the following nouns and word-combinations in plural

petroleum geologist

world market

computer program

refinery

weather condition

summer vacation month

country

take-or-pay contract

petroleum

unpredictable political implication

high price

this deregulation effort

refining plant

inland waterway

6. Give the plural forms of the following nouns

tomato

tooth

aircraft

child

mouth

man

datum

radius

fish

crossroad

Translation section

6. Translate the following sentences from English into Ukrainian

1. Over tens of thousands of years, the layers become thick, and the weight of the overlying sediments compacts the earlier deposits.

2. Geologists group the rocks of the earth's crust into three types according to how they were formed: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.

3. Wind, water, and moving ice erode all types of rock, carry the particles to the ocean or lakes, and create new sedi­mentary rock.

4. Erosion, movement of crustal plates, and movement of molten rock continuously create new types of rock from the old

5. A petroleum reservoir is a rock formation that holds oil and gas, somewhat like a sponge holds water.

6. The heaviest components, mostly iron and nickel, sank to the earth's center and became the core.

7. A syncline that dips down toward a common center is called a basin.

8. Most geolo­gists today believe that the crust is an assemblage of huge plates that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

9. When rocks near the surface break, or fracture, the two halves may move in relation to each other.

10. Faults are important to the petroleum geologist because they affect the location of oil and gas accu­mulations.