Difference Between Much and A Lot of
‘Much’ and ‘a lot of’ are English grammatical terms which should be used carefully. ‘Much’ is used in negative and interrogative sentences. For example,
‘How much time do you need to complete the task?’
‘There is not much water in the pool.’
‘Do you face much trouble with the children?’
In the above sentence the word ‘much’ is used in negative and interrogative sentences. In the above sentence ‘much’ means ‘sufficient’. If the word ‘much’ is used in negative sentence, it means ‘not sufficient’ while in questions it means ‘weather sufficient’. In the first and second sentence the word ‘much’ is used with uncountable nouns ‘time’ and ‘water’.
The difference between ‘much’ and ‘a lot of’ is that ‘a lot of’ is used with a countable as well as uncountable noun. On the other hand ‘much’ is used with uncountable noun only. See the example.
He spent a lot of money on his tour.
He has a read a lot of books on religion.
‘a lot of’ is used with an uncountable noun in the first sentence while in the other it has been used with a countable noun. ‘Money’ is an uncountable noun while ‘books’ is a countable noun. This is the major difference between ‘a lot of’ and ‘much’.
Hence it can safely be said that ‘a lot of’ can be used in statements or affirmative sentences. ‘A lot of’ is used with both countable as well as uncountable noun and ‘much’ is used only with countable noun.