If you’ve got confused about it and want to know what does “every second house has a car” mean, you’re welcome!
This post is about all I’ve got on google. I’m not a native English speaker and therefore I, individually, can’t prove it. if you don’t want to read the whole article, go to the last line.
Like my last 200 days, I’ve been studying my German…, but suddenly I noticed a weird sentence. as usual, I googled it, but other than Duolingo‘s Discussion was nothing, so I decided to write this blog for guys like me who don’t speak English as their native language and got confused.
This is nana talk. A house can have a window/roof and a door, because it is fixed part of it, a so called feature of the house.
A car is not a feature of a house. In our example, the families in every second house own a car(s), that’s what it is.
I wouldn’t talk like that, but you may hear that sentence in spoken German.
backtoschool
so many native English speakers mentioned that “nana talk” is an unusual phrase for them like it was for me. so I just decided to ignore it. not only for that, but also the rest of his reply wasn’t clear for me.
Deeper in the page, I found this one:
“Every second house” is perfectly normal in Australian English. Colloquially it means “50% of houses”, but it can also mean the more specific “alternating houses”.
I believe Americans would say “Every other house” to convey this same meaning. But in Australia, “every other house” would mean “every house except this one”.
mrdeanvincent
conclusion
What I realized is that it probably means “Half of the households have a car.”, “Every other house has a car” or something like this.