Near vs Far — This, That, These, Those Singular vs Plural — Number Agreement with Demonstratives Time Reference — This Week, Those Days, These Days Phone Language — This Is... / Is That...? Back-Reference — Reacting and Referring Back with 'That' Fixed Expressions — That's Right, Like This, That's It

Singular vs Plural — Number Agreement with Demonstratives

Master demonstrative agreement with nouns: this and that with singular and uncountable nouns, these and those with plural nouns. Covers trousers, glasses, information, luggage.

Number Agreement: Singular vs Plural Demonstratives

English demonstratives must agree in number with the noun they modify. This and that go with singular and uncountable nouns; these and those go with plural nouns. Analysis of the Cambridge Learner Corpus identifies demonstrative number agreement as the most frequent demonstrative error type at A2–B1 level. The difficulty concentrates on two noun categories: plural-only nouns (trousers, scissors, glasses, people) and uncountable nouns (information, luggage, news, furniture), whose grammatical number does not match learners' intuitions about how many things they refer to.

Singular and Uncountable → This / That

That apple looks delicious. (singular)
This information is very useful. (uncountable)
That luggage over there is mine. (uncountable)
Who is that man by the window? (singular)

Plural → These / Those

These cookies smell amazing! (plural)
I don't like these shoes. (plural)
Are these your glasses? (plural-only noun)
These trousers are too long for me. (plural-only noun)

Tricky Nouns: Plural-Only and Uncountable

The following nouns require fixed demonstrative forms regardless of context:

Plural-only: these/those trousers, scissors, glasses, people, children
Uncountable: this/that information, luggage, news, furniture, equipment

Common Mistakes

✗ This trousers are too long. → ✓ These trousers are too long.
✗ Those luggage is mine. → ✓ That luggage is mine.
✗ These information is useful. → ✓ This information is useful.