1 a Proper nouns have unique reference, that is, they refer to a person or thing, of which there is no other. Personal and geographical names are typical proper nouns. They do not usually allow the plural nor are they preceded by an article (the, a). All proper nouns have capital letters, but not all words with capital letters are proper nouns.

Proper nouns in the text are: Food Network (in the title), Andrew Smith, Erie Canal and Wonder Bread. Americans, on the other hand, is not a proper noun because it refers to more than one entity.

b Common nouns, then, are all the other nouns in the text. We can divide these into abstract nouns, like farming, history and industry, and concrete nouns, like economists, grocers and vendors, although the distinction is not always a clear-cut one. Its only relevance, perhaps, is that concrete nouns are easier to teach because they are easier to represent.

c Count nouns (also called countable nouns) are all the nouns in plural form (farmers, events, Americans, giants, etc.), along with any other noun that can have a plural form (war, place, course, family, street, etc.).

d The one collective noun in the text is family, although here it is being used as a noun modifier (see below). It is possible to say both her family is rich and her family are rich. Other nouns like family are army, audience, committee, government and team.

e Clear cases of non-count nouns are: farming and history. In this text, soup, industry and food are also being used in their non-count sense, although all three can be pluralized in certain contexts. Foodscape, by analogy with landscape, is probably being used in a noun-count sense, too. The hungry and the affluent are special cases, in that they are formed from adjectives (see below). While they have no plural form, they take a plural verb (the hungry are …).

f There are many noun modifiers in the text (and this makes it very dense – see Task 10 below). In this sentence, the noun modifiers are underlined: home economists and fancy restaurateurs, family farmers and corporate giants, street vendors and captains of industry, mom-and-pop grocers and massive food conglomerates, burger barons and vegetarians, the hungry and the affluent, hard-hitting advertisers and health food advocates.