How do you say “2 August” out loud?
This week’s news told the story of a two-day strike at WestJet, Canada’s second-largest airline. The article is full of numbers — 4,400 flight attendants, 309 cancelled flights, 250,000 affected passengers. But English uses two different number systems, and mixing them up is a common mistake.
We use cardinal numbers (one, two, three, four thousand four hundred) to count things — how many people, how many flights, how much money. We use ordinal numbers (first, second, third) to put things in order — a date, a position in a list, or a rank like “Canada’s second-largest airline”. Ordinal numbers usually end in -st, -nd, -rd or -th, and we normally add the before them: the second of August, the first officer, the third runway.
Watch out for this mistake: we write dates with a cardinal number (2 August) but say them with an ordinal number (the second of August). Don’t say “two August” — and don’t forget the the.
Try these
Choose the correct answer for each question below.
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The strike began on 2 August. How do you say this date aloud?
Dates are written with cardinal numbers (2 August) but spoken with ordinal numbers and “the”: the second of August.
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WestJet is Canada’s ____-largest airline.
Rankings — first, second, third-largest — always use ordinal numbers, not cardinal numbers.
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The article mentions 4,400 flight attendants, 309 cancelled flights, and 250,000 affected passengers. Which number tells you how many flights WestJet cancelled?
309 is the number of cancelled flights — you have to read the sentence carefully, since all three numbers appear close together in the text.
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Choose the correct sentence.
Percentages and other quantities use cardinal numbers (36 percent); only rankings and dates use ordinal numbers.
Now make it real
Look at your flight schedule, your roster, or today’s date. Write 1–2 true sentences of your own that use a cardinal number and an ordinal number correctly — a shift start time, a flight number, or how many sectors you’re flying this month.
Before you check, ask yourself:
- Does your sentence say what you actually meant?
- If you wrote a date, did you use the and an ordinal number (the third of September, not three September)?
- Did you use a cardinal number for a quantity (how many, how much)?
- Capital letter and full stop?
- “I’m on duty from the third of September.”
- “This is my 12th flight this month, and I have four more sectors to go.”
Now rewrite your sentence — can you add one more number to make it clearer?
CEFR Level A2 / ICAO Level 3
Want more practice at this level? Browse our CEFR A2 archive for more short, clear articles like this one.
