No, a number need not be introduced by such qualifiers as “some,” “about,” and “more or less.” If it’s an exact or precise count, it should be written in either of two ways: (a) in spelled out form when the number is less than 11, as in “Five teams competed in the school intramurals,” or (b) in figures when the number is 11 or more, as in “There are 15 marbles in the toy box.” When a number starts a sentence, the predominant style is to spell it out, as in “Fifty six examinees passed the qualifying exams”; it does look unsightly if not confusing to write that sentence as “56 examinees passed the qualifying exams” (the number could be mistaken for a serial number), and all the more so when the exact number is rather large as in, say, “37,513 took the 2011 nursing board exam in the Philippines.” This is why in print journalism in particular, it has become stylistic if not habitual for news reporters and editors to preface such exact numbers with a qualifier like “a total of” so the sentence won’t begin with a number in figures, as in “A total of 36,513 took the 2011 nursing board exam in the Philippines.”
It’s when the count is not exact or is simply a hunch or an approximation that a number can be modified by such qualifiers as “some,” “about,” “more or less,” or “an estimated,” as in “Some 30 of my fellow graduates in high school didn’t go to college but went directly into business” and “An estimated 1,600 fatalities were reported when Typhoon Pablo hit Mindanao in early December of 2012.” Of course, it would be grammatically and semantically wrong to use such qualifiers for exact figures, as in the following flawed sentence that some junior reporters might write unwittingly: “Some 1,067 fatalities were initially reported when Typhoon Pablo hit Mindanao in early December of 2012.” The astute news editor will, of course, immediately correct that sentence to “A total of 1,067 fatalities were initially reported when Typhoon Pablo hit Mindanao in early December of 2012.”
