Numbers in words: get the ending and the hyphen right
My daughter is thirteen and my son is thirty-one.
The flat costs seventy-five pounds a week.Each sentence has a gap with a figure in brackets beside it. Write that figure out in letters, exactly as you would in a sentence of your own. Where the figure lies between 21 and 99, the answer is a single hyphenated word: neither a pair of separate words with a space between them, nor the halves run together with nothing between them. Give the missing word only, and leave the brackets and the rest of the sentence as they are.
1. My sister is ___ (13), and my mother is thirty-nine.
2. The village school has only ___ (40) pupils this year.
3. I waited ___ (15) minutes for the bus, not fifty.
4. My grandmother turned ___ (81) in April.
5. The concert hall seats ___ (99) people.Show the answers
1. thirteen
2. forty
3. fifteen
4. eighty-one
5. ninety-nineItems 1 and 3 ask for figures in the 13 to 19 range; items 2, 4 and 5 need a multiple of 10, in the last pair of them inside a compound. The whole set turns on the pair of endings. In speech the ending of the 13 to 19 word has the longer vowel and closes on a consonant the other ending lacks, and said on its own the first carries its beat on the ending, the second on the syllable in front. In quick speech that consonant is swallowed and only the beat is left, which is why learners write the wrong form. Watch the spelling in items 2 and 4: in item 2 the multiple of 10 drops a letter that both its unit and the 13 to 19 word built on that unit keep, and in item 4 it adds a single letter to the unit. In items 4 and 5 the hyphen is compulsory.