求教一道关于less和fewer的OG题

spoooon

Around 1900, fishermen in the Chesapeake Bay area landed more than seventeen million pounds of shad in a single year, but by 1920, overfishing and the proliferation of milldams and culverts that have blocked shad migrations up their spawning streams had reduced landings to less than four million pounds.
(A) that have blocked shad migrations up their spawning streams had reduced landings to less
(B) that blocked shad from migrating up their spawning streams had reduced landings to less
(C) that blocked shad from migrating up their spawning streams reduced landings to a lower amount
(D) having blocked shad from migrating up their spawning streams reduced landings to less
(E) having blocked shad migrations up their spawning streams had reduced landings to an amount lower

这道题对于答案没有疑问，但是在og解答里有提到B中：Despite a possible superficial appearance of a comparison between countable things (pounds), less is more
appropriate than fewer for the comparison.

请问这是为什么？除了修饰可数不可数，less和few还有什么区别？

感谢大家花时间看我的问题啦

撑胆大饿胆小

疯狂的狐狸 发表于 2016-5-10 22:21
you only use "fewer than" with what are called countable items.
strictly speaking, this means thin ...

这个太棒了！！ 因为另外一题：
Less than 400 Sumatran rhinos survive on the Malay penisula............
OG解释说这题 Less than 400 Sumatran rhinos 不对，要用Fewer than。
如果只认为Less 跟不可数的话，这个题就没法解释了。 Ron的解释很到位啊

spoooon

疯狂的狐狸 发表于 2016-5-10 22:21
you only use "fewer than" with what are called countable items.
strictly speaking, this means thin ...

好嘞已改 蟹蟹咯

疯狂的狐狸

you only use "fewer than" with what are called countable items.
strictly speaking, this means things that:
1) ONLY exist in whole number quantities (i.e., you can't have, say, 5.5 of them), and
2) are actually separable from each other.
for instance, people, shirts, books, etc. all satisfy these two criteria. you can't have decimal quantities of any of those things, and each unit is separable from the other units.
specifically, you don't use "fewer than" with NUMBERS + UNITS OF CONTINUOUS MEASURE, such as gallons, years, feet, liters, etc.
this isn't really an exception to the rule, anyway, since those units fail both of the criteria above. for instance, if i have N gallons of something, then (1) fails because i can easily have a decimal number of gallons, and (2) of fails because the gallons are not physically separable quantities -- just one big mass of fluid.

from RON
麻烦把划线部分加上去 题目排版看着好累呀 答案能不能隐藏或者写靠下面一些的位置呀 大家点进来都会想先做一遍题目哒