How come the answer to "how much" here is countable?

Question

I came across this sentence in an exercise:

• [Blank] yogurt do you need?
  • Three cups.

The options for the blank are the following:

A. How long B. How far C. How many D. How much

The answer is D, but why is answered by "three cups"?

Answer 1

When you quantify a mass noun, you need to use a count noun to do it.

How much fruit did you get? Three pieces of fruit.
How much gasoline does your tank hold? Fifty liters of gasoline.
How much sugar do you take in your coffee? Two cubes of sugar.
How much ice cream should I get you? Three scoops of ice cream.
How much rice do you have? Half a cup of rice (or 3600 grains of rice).
How much corn? Ten ears of corn (or 70 kernels of corn).
How much garlic? Five cloves of garlic (or one bulb of garlic).
How much rain? Twenty drops of rain (or three inches of rain, or forty days of rain).

So "three cups of yogurt" is a perfectly normal phrase in English. Here, a cup is probably a unit of measure used in America equal to approximately 1/4 liter.

Note that some mass nouns require rather specific count nouns (e.g. "ears of corn") to quantify them.

Answer 2

Yogurt in this case is treated as a mass noun, like many English words referring to a bulk product. (Yogurts is a word, but it refers to a collection of different types or containers of yogurt.) You're correct that the answer is D, because mass nouns are uncountable, and how much is used for measured amounts.

Three cups is simply a measurement of volume (about 0.7 liter), and when mass nouns of physical objects are quantified, it's usually by either volume or mass (weight).

Answer 3

I would like to answer the OP's question left as a comment but I will also tie it in with the main question.

Yogurt is treated as a mass noun, it should be uncountable, but why can we use the expression " a yogurt "

If you were to pour a large pot of yoghurt on a flat surface such as a plate, it would be very difficult to quantify. Yoghurt doesn't separate itself, it's one entire mass and hence it (the yoghurt) is recognizable as being singular. In order to quantify this thick sloppy substance you might say; there's a lot of yoghurt on the plate; that's quite a bit; the plate is almost full etc. But plates come in different sizes and what is a lot for one person, is "normal" for another. You could however take a cup and proceed to fill it. The number of filled cups is the quantity of the yoghurt, e.g. three cups.

Luckily, yoghurt is sold in standard-sized pots, and not in cups. A single pot is enough to contain 150g of yoghurt. A large yoghurt pot will usually contain 500g. Pots are countable, we can buy one pot of yoghurt or two pots. Hence

• one / a pot of yoghurt
• two pots of yoghurt

Note that the word, yoghurt, is singular and it will remain in the singular regardless of the number of pots:
"I'd like fifty pots of strawberry yoghurt" The British and Americans being two populations famed for their love of brevity and taking short-cuts will simply say

• "a yoghurt"
• "two yoghurts"

The meaning therefore is clear, unambiguous and also grammatical.