want to speak real english from your first lesson sign up for your free lifetime account at englishclass101.com hi everybody my name is alicia in this lesson i'm going to talk about three ways to use the word of this will not cover all uses of the word of but we'll focus in on three very common and very useful ways to use this word let's get started okay the first use of of i want to talk about is use to show connection or relationship between part or parts and whole so this means when we want to show
that two things two or more things have some kind of relationship they fit together or they have some kind of connection or we want to talk about things within a larger group so like for example pieces of things that are inside a hole of something we use this meaning of of let's take a look at some examples first example i ate a piece of cake here we're showing parts inside a hole in this case we're looking at one part here my part is a piece and the whole in this case is a cake so when
i want to talk about one part in this case a piece i connect the part to the whole with the word of i ate a piece of cake i could make this a plural word if i wanted to i ate pieces of cake so i'm still showing a relationship between parts and whole with these words so you'll see of used in this way very commonly with these counter words and uncountable nouns let's take a look at the next example sentence he broke part of my table he broke part of my table so again we see
of is connecting in this case quite literally a part to a hole in this case my table my table represents the hole we're talking about here so he broke part of my table could mean like for example one leg of the table or a corner of the table one piece one portion of the table so he broke part of my table shows that only one piece was affected we show part and the relationship to the whole by connecting them with of he broke part my table is not correct part of my table is correct okay
let's move on to the next sentence one of the kids cried one of the kids cried here we have the kids referring to a specific group of kids the part here is one this means one child one kid in the group of kids cried so you'll often see this kind of pattern used when we're talking about people groups of people like students or workers and so on so one of the kids cried we could change this to the plural form as well two of the kids cried it shows parts or a small number inside a
larger group so in this example sentence we don't know the total number here but because the kids in the plural form is used we know that it refers to a specific group of kids and we want to talk about one of those kids we show the relationship between this one kid and the group of kids with of one of the kids cried so this is the first way to use of for this lesson i want to talk about one more important and related use of of which is to show a portion inside something to show
a portion inside something means to talk about uh more than one of something inside a group for example so in these cases i focused on just one part inside a larger group but if you want to talk about larger numbers for example the majority or the minority inside a group we can use of to show that relationship let's look at some examples first most of the students passed the test most of the students passed the test so here i'm talking again about people we see a very similar sentence here the kids was in my previous
example sentence here the students so i'm talking about a specific group of students i'm showing though most of the students passed the test so not just one or two or three students passed the test but most of the students passed the test so i connect this most with the larger whole so this could be the students in the class or the students in the school whatever i connect this part even though it's a majority even though it's most i connect this with of most of the students passed the test you might also hear the pattern
most students passed the test that is also okay if you're including this the though you need to include of because this the students is referring to a specific group so the our definite article is showing us that we're talking about a specific group of students so this could be most of the students in this class or in my class something specific is happening there so we use the we connect it with of if you don't use a specific definite article for example most students pass the test that's okay but the statement becomes less specific you're
just talking about maybe students across the country for example we don't know it's not so clear there so if you're using the definite article make sure to use of to connect it okay let's look at another example the majority of people at the event were rich the majority of people at the event were rich okay so here i'm using majority the majority the majority so majority is another way to say most the largest number of people in other words so majority for example could mean like 80 percent of people basically more than 50 percent is
a majority so the majority of people at the event were rich so this is an example sentence where i could choose to use the definite article or not the majority of the people at the event were rich that would also be okay because i'm making it very clear in the sentence which people i mean so people at the event the specific group of people so i could say the majority of the people at the event were rich that's also okay i've chosen not to include it here because this extra information tells me which people so
the majority of people at the event were rich here my part is this percentage of people so 50 or more of this group people at the event were rich i show the connection by using of so this is my part my portion and this is my total group my hole here okay one more example of this none of us had any idea what to do none of us had any idea what to do so here we're showing zero none of us so us because we're using us it refers to a group that means nobody inside
our group no people zero people inside our group had any idea what to do so we connect this with none of us so we wouldn't really say zero of us it wouldn't sound so natural we would say none of us you could also say nobody had any idea what to do but we're using of here because we're showing a portion in this case none and we're showing a whole so when you want to show this relationship between something inside the hole and the larger group the larger hole you connect the two with of okay let's
continue on to the second point for this lesson the second point for this lesson is using of to talk about the materials or parts something is made with or to talk about an object's contents so contents means the things inside something else this is a bit different from what we've talked about over here let's look at a few example sentences first let's focus on these two a cup made of silver a cup made of silver this use of of here is showing us the materials that the cup is made of so a cup made of
silver silver is the material cup is the object you'll notice too made is in parentheses sometimes native speakers will drop this part when we're talking about the materials or the parts something is made with a cup of silver this can sound a little bit more formal but sometimes we do choose to use made of silver i like to include it for this lesson just to make it a little bit more clear which kind of of we're talking about so a cup of silver is also okay to use to me it sounds a little bit more
polite so this of is showing us a material silver for a cup let's go on to the next sentence also a material sentence her earrings were made of gold her earrings were made of gold so again you see our material comes after our connecting word of and the object it's connecting to is earrings her earrings were made of gold so these two sentences show us how we use of to indicate a material or a part that something can be made with i want to look at the next two sentences though these two sentences refer to
using of for objects contents first example sentence i'd like a glass of wine please i'd like a glass of wine please so you'll notice as we talked about in this part we have a counter word and an uncountable noun so wine is an uncountable noun glass is a way to count portions of wine a way to count servings of wine here however it's referring to the contents of the glass so i'd like a glass of wine please means one glass full of wine so inside the glass is just wine a glass of wine we could
say a pint of beer or a cup of juice for example those are all counter words plus uncountable noun connected with of patterns so here this part is referring to the counter word this is the uncountable noun that's completely inside it we connect the two with of one more example of this the box was full of old letters the box was full of old letters this one does not use an uncountable noun here we're talking about a box in this case this box the contents of this box was or were rather the contents were old
letters old letters so we're using of here because this is a good hint word full full means like 100 of the inside of the box was old letters so we're showing the contents there with uh we're connecting the item the object to its contents with the word of we could change this we could add other things too the box was full of old letters and pens and pencils or the box was full of old pictures we could change that we could add other things to this sentence if we want but we're showing here the contents
of the box full of something so you may see that empty is used in a pattern like this like the box was for example empty of money empty of money so this may seem a little bit strange why would you say that but it means there was no money inside the box empty means there's nothing inside so the box was full of means it's 100 percent uh things inside something empty means nothing zero percent so the box was empty of money is correct we sometimes use that it sounds a little bit more formal a little
bit more polite but when you want to talk about the contents of something in this case a box or perhaps a bag a purse you can use of to connect the contents with the object itself okay so with this in mind let's continue to our last use of of for this lesson number three we use of to show belonging you see this a lot in organizations in government situations companies schools and so on we use it to show belonging to be a member of something let's look at these examples here she's the head of the
company she's the head of the company means she's the top of the company so in these patterns the company is the organization that's the group the head means the top or her position the way in which she belongs to the company she's the head of the company we could change this part right here to reflect a different position in the organization she's a manager in the company she's a worker in the company but you'll notice we change of to in in situations like that because it's like we're not talking about one specific key figure we're
talking about one person that's kind of like a member of a group so she's a manager of the company might be used in situations where a person is like a top manager so this is kind of another key point we use this of pattern when belonging to talk about like key roles in organizations or key roles for organizations so she's the head of the company in contrast we would not say she's the head in the company we would not use a pattern like that she's the head of the company let's look at another example here
have you ever seen the queen of england have you ever seen the queen of england here england it's a country but we think of england as our group our organization queen then the queen shows this top level position so the queen of england meaning she is the queen that belongs to england so this shows her relationship to this larger organization in this case a country so the queen of england so we would use this again for like politicians we would use this for public figures kings queens and so on but again they're at this very
high level position in their organization so let's look at one maybe smaller level organization for this last example we're the leaders of this group we're the leaders of this group so this could be a volunteer group in your community for example here the group is our organization the leaders the leaders in this case more than one person the leaders are the top people in the organization we connect the top people to the organization to which they belong with the word of we're the leaders of this group so if we wanted to talk about the members
we could say we're members of such and such group yes but you would use that if you're introducing yourself to someone outside the situation and you kind of want to show perhaps a sense of pride in your belonging we tend to use in more when we're talking more internally i feel so like i'm a member of such and such group would be okay but we would probably use for like companies and so on like a manager in this company so there are a couple situations where there's a little bit of flexibility in terms of the
preposition that's used but a good rule is that when you're talking about the leader of something the leader of a group or the leader of an organization you can use of to show their role so leader queen king head of company and use of to connect it to the company name the organization name the country name and so on if you want to talk about the members of something if you're talking to someone outside the group it might be a good idea to use of i'm a member of such and such group or i'm a
manager in this company i would prefer personally to use in for talking about company sorts of things i would probably use of for talking about like group related things so this is perhaps a small point that's a little bit different for lower level people in organizations but as i said a good rule is to show belonging for people at the tops of organizations with of uh so i hope that this lesson gave you some good ideas and some good chances to practice these three uses of the word of as i said there are many other
ways to use this word but i feel that these are probably some of the most common ways and perhaps we can talk more about other uses of of in another video in the future if you have any questions or comments or if you want to practice making a sentence with this word please feel free to do so in the comments section of course if you liked this lesson please don't forget to give it a thumbs up subscribe to our channel if you have not already and check us out at englishclass101.com for some other things that
can help you with your english studies thanks very much for watching this lesson and i will see you again soon bye-bye want to speed up your language learning take your very first lesson with us you'll start speaking in minutes and master real conversations sign up for your free lifetime account just click the link in the description
