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I'd like to ask you some questions.

Firstly that is this. " When one of a person's ten nearest neighbors bought a car, the [ ]that that person would buy a car of the same brand during the next week..."

I thought the word that is proper was possibilities though, the answer is chances. Could you let me know why 'chances' is correct?

And there's another one. "You add the team skills like [ ] you get from playing a sport." I thought 'what' is proper though, the answer is those. I wonder if what is also acceptable or not

Thank you!

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  • Have a look at relevant prevalence for the chance/chances of that happening. Relatively speaking it's still an emerging expression, but obviously both singular and plural are idiomatically fine. And it would be fatuous to argue for a semantic distinction.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Feb 24, 2018 at 17:51
  • 'The likelihood that that person' ... sounds more idiomatic, to me.
    – user63615
    Commented Feb 24, 2018 at 17:57

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  1. In this context, the word "chances" is equivalent to "probability" (see definition 1.1 here https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/chance). On the other hand, "possibilities" is more similar to "things that may happen." (see https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/possibility).

  2. "Those" refers to specific things already mentioned (see https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/that), while "what" is a pronoun meaning "things that" (see https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/what). Accordingly, "those" is more specifically refers to team skills, while "what" could theoretically mean more than that.

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