Put in the missing word, or leave the gap empty
I saw a dog in the park. The dog was limping.
Cats sleep for most of the day.Each sentence has a gap in front of a noun. Write the one word that belongs there. In two of the five, the correct answer is that nothing belongs there at all: for those, write the word for an absence of quantity rather than leaving your answer blank, so that you can tell a deliberate choice from a forgotten one. Look at whether the noun is singular, plural or uncountable, and at whether your reader can already tell which one you mean.
1. I need ___ new chair for my office.
2. ___ chair you ordered last week has arrived.
3. ___ chairs are cheaper online than in the shops.
4. She gave me ___ advice that I still follow.
5. We had ___ breakfast before we left the house.Show the answers
1. a
2. The
3. nothing
4. the
5. nothingItems 1 and 2 are the same noun twice and show the core contrast: first mention, new to the reader, takes the indefinite article; second mention, made identifiable by the words following it, takes the definite one. Item 3 is a general statement about a plural noun, so nothing goes in front. Item 4 looks like item 1 but the noun is uncountable in English, which rules the indefinite article out entirely; the words after the noun make it identifiable, so the definite article is correct. Item 5 belongs to the small closed set of meals and institutions that drop the article when you mean the ordinary activity rather than a particular instance of it.