Please complete the following exercise using a/an/the/0 (no article) in the underlined spaces where appropriate. (Some articles have been included for you, but others are missing.) Change capital letters to lower case letters at the beginning of a sentence if necessary. There has never been (1) ___ more exciting time to produce (2) ___ new dictionary. Everything is changing and expanding: the English language itself, the technology that helps us to describe it, and (3) ___ needs and goals of those learning and teaching (4) ___ English. (5) ___ 1980s saw the development of (6) ___ first large corpora (special collections) of English text. (7) ___ Another of the Macmillan English Dictionary’s innovations is that two similar but separate editions have been created from (8) ___ same database: one for learners whose main target variety is (9) ___ American English, (10) ___ other for learners of British English. The differences are small but significant. The Macmillan English Dictionary is the product of good linguistic data and high-quality people. It has been (11) ___ privilege to work with such (12) ___ talented and creative team, and I would like to thank (13) ___ team for producing such (14) ___ excellent book. I hope you enjoy (15) ___ results of our hard work and find the dictionary (16) ___ pleasure to use. (adapted from Rundell, M 2002, ‘Introduction’, Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners, Macmillan Education, Oxford, p. x.) Exercise based on the opening text in Thanks a Million Can you add articles (a/an/the) where necessary in the following text? Change capital letters to lower case letters at the beginning of a sentence if necessary. Ms Parrot, most famous lady detective of twenty-first century, was born in United Kingdom in 1960s. Since then, she has been to many countries, including Portugal, Singapore and Australia, and has lived in northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere, as well as on equator. She has never been to Philippines or United States, but she speaks English, French and Portuguese. Like Sherlock Holmes, famous detective, she plays violin, and sometimes practises up to five times day. She is also only person in world to have performed Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture in one breath on recorder. She has been detective for thirty years and claims that although many people think that being detective is piece of cake, detectives generally work very hard and it’s not all fun and games. Detective is someone who solves mysteries, and people who contact Ms Parrot have some very unusual problems. Little information is available about some of cases she has solved, but quite few of her most famous cases have attracted worldwide attention and she has been offered up to thousand dollars hour to help solve mysteries such as case of Australian owl in uniform. Bird laid egg in European nest in less than hour after its arrival. What strange problem! With great modesty, she has either declined such fee or donated money to poor, or to Grammar Survival Fund, believing that detective should use their skills for common good. Can you add articles (a/an/the) where necessary in the following text? (Some articles have been included for you, but others are missing.) The Harvard referencing system has two essential components: brief in-text references throughout your assignment and a comprehensive list of references at end of your assignment. The in-text reference should give date that the work you are referring to was published, the family name of the author and, in the case of quotations, page where the quotation was found. It is easy system, once you understand it. (adapted from Hay, I, Bochner, D & Dungey, C 1997, Making the grade, Oxford University Press Australia, Sydney, p. 155) Can you add articles (a/an/the) where necessary in the following text? N.B. This exercise is very difficult and caused a lot of discussion among speakers of English as a first language. Different choices of article are possible in several cases, depending on how the noun is interpreted. Note that ‘mercenary’ can be both a noun and an adjective, and ‘reward’ can be either a countable or an uncountable noun. There are different kinds of reward. There is reward which has no natural connexion with things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not natural reward of love; that is why we call man mercenary if he marries woman for sake of her money. But marriage is proper reward for real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. General who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; general who fights for victory is not, victory being proper reward of battle as marriage is proper reward of love. (Lewis, CS 1949, Transposition and other addresses, Geoffrey Bles, London, p. 22)