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ten more dollars
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Topic: ten more dollars (Read 2272 times)
azz
Sr. Member
Posts: 387
ten more dollars
«
on:
May 07, 2019, 07:28:29 am »
a, I had to pay ten more dollars to get what I wanted.
b. I had to pay another ten dollars to get what I wanted.
c. I had to pay ten dollars in addition to what I had paid to get what I wanted.
d. I had to pay ten dollars more than I had paid to get what I wanted.
e. I had to pay ten dollars more than what I had paid to get what I wanted.
I think the sentences are all grammatical, but do the last two mean the same as the others?
I am not sure about that.
Let's say I had paid 40 dollars to John to get what I wanted. But then he said I had to pay an additional ten dollars. I had to pay him ten more dollars. The first three can be used in this case. What about the other two. If I use them in that context, wouldn't I be saying that I paid someone ten dollars more than what I had paid to John? Wouldn't I be saying that I paid someone 50 dollars?
Many thanks.
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Darryl
Administrator
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Posts: 3023
Far North Queensland, Australia
Re: ten more dollars
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Reply #1 on:
May 07, 2019, 09:29:11 am »
All of them are essentially the same. John is not mentioned in any of the sentences, so we do not know to whom the extra $10 is paid.
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Britta
Administrator
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Posts: 975
Technical writer
Re: ten more dollars
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Reply #2 on:
May 07, 2019, 05:02:41 pm »
c, d and e are strange. If you had got what you wanted originally, why pay more dollars?
So, the point is, you had to pay 10 dollars more than
the original estimate
in order to get what you wanted. I prefer variant b.
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If it's not used by a native speaker it's not idiomatic. And idiom trumps grammar every time. Jack Wilkerson
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ten more dollars