Kotfor
Member
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2011
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Ukrainian
- Home Country
- Belarus
- Current Location
- Ukraine
Are both correct?
1) This bag is twice bigger.
2) This bag is twice as big.
Plus do you agree with this article
This is something that has been bugging me a long time, so I just had to make a write-up to clarify the subject a bit.
A very common mistake, or just something people don't really pay attention to or care about, is to say "two times more" (or any number of times, two is just an example here) when they actually mean "twice as much".
"But they're the same, what's the difference?" I hear people already murmuring inside their heads. Wrong, they're not the same, and the difference can be (in a very concrete, real-life way) huge. I'll give you a couple of examples to clarify the difference.
If you have one dollar and I promise to give you one time more (meaning 100% more) it's very easy, grade-school math to calculate that 1 + 1 * 1 = 2. When people say "it costs two times more" they often mean that something, which used to cost 1 dollar now costs 2 dollars. But, how could that be when it was already shown that just "one time more" already makes that 1-dollar item cost 2 dollars; how could "two times more" be as much as "one time more"? The answer is simple: it isn't - "two times more" would make that 1-dollar item cost 3 dollars (1 + 2 * 1 = 3)! "X times more" means addition on top of what you already have!
http://everything2.com/title/Two+times+more+--+or+twice+as+much%3F
1) This bag is twice bigger.
2) This bag is twice as big.
Plus do you agree with this article
This is something that has been bugging me a long time, so I just had to make a write-up to clarify the subject a bit.
A very common mistake, or just something people don't really pay attention to or care about, is to say "two times more" (or any number of times, two is just an example here) when they actually mean "twice as much".
"But they're the same, what's the difference?" I hear people already murmuring inside their heads. Wrong, they're not the same, and the difference can be (in a very concrete, real-life way) huge. I'll give you a couple of examples to clarify the difference.
If you have one dollar and I promise to give you one time more (meaning 100% more) it's very easy, grade-school math to calculate that 1 + 1 * 1 = 2. When people say "it costs two times more" they often mean that something, which used to cost 1 dollar now costs 2 dollars. But, how could that be when it was already shown that just "one time more" already makes that 1-dollar item cost 2 dollars; how could "two times more" be as much as "one time more"? The answer is simple: it isn't - "two times more" would make that 1-dollar item cost 3 dollars (1 + 2 * 1 = 3)! "X times more" means addition on top of what you already have!
http://everything2.com/title/Two+times+more+--+or+twice+as+much%3F