Word
O equipamento do laboratório é muito caro.
Meaning
The laboratory's equipment is very expensive.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of O equipamento do laboratório é muito caro.
ser
to be
do
of the / from the (do, da, dos, das)
muito
much / very
caro
expensive
Questions & Answers about O equipamento do laboratório é muito caro.
Why do we use é here instead of está?
We use ser (é) because being expensive is treated as an inherent, permanent characteristic of this specific lab equipment. If you wanted to say the equipment is temporarily expensive (for example, if market prices recently went up), you would use estar and say está muito caro.
In English, we often just say 'laboratory equipment'. Why do we need do here?
In Portuguese, you cannot stack nouns together like adjectives to describe something. You must use the preposition de (of) to link them. Here, de combines with the masculine definite article o (the) to make do, literally translating to 'the equipment of the laboratory'.
If I add já que (since) to the beginning to make this a reason, does the word order change?
No, the word order stays exactly the same! If you say já que o equipamento do laboratório é muito caro (since the lab equipment is very expensive), the conjunction já que is simply followed by the normal subject-verb order and uses the indicative mood.
Is equipamento always singular, like 'equipment' is in English?
Unlike English, where 'equipment' is uncountable and never takes an 's', the Portuguese word equipamento is countable. You can say os equipamentos if you are referring to multiple distinct devices or systems. In this sentence, the singular is just used collectively for the gear in the lab.