The words places are described with
Eight words used about places. Match each to what it actually tells you.
Four extracts
A · Written for people who live there
The market has moved again, which everybody expected and nobody was told. It is now behind the old cinema, on the side where the buses used to turn, and the fish stall has not come with it.
The council say the new site is better for footfall. The traders say the new site is a car park with awnings. Both are true. What has actually gone is the walk between the bridge and the square, which is where people used to meet without arranging to.
B · The same town, written for people who have never been
Coimbra is a university city built on a hill above a river, and almost everything about it follows from those two facts. There is an old town at the top and a new one at the bottom, and a great many steps in between.
A market operates most mornings near the centre. It has moved several times in recent years, most recently to a site behind a disused cinema, a decision that is unpopular with traders and — as far as a visitor can tell — with everyone else.
C · A geography, plainly written
The country is bounded on the west by the Atlantic and on the east by Spain. The Douro rises in Spain and enters the sea at Porto; the Tagus divides the country roughly in half.
North of the Douro the land is high and broken. The Serra da Estrela, the highest range on the mainland, holds snow into April. South of the Tagus the country flattens into the Alentejo, which is hot, empty and enormous, and further south again the Algarve is a coast with a region attached to it.
D · A reflection, thirty years later
Home is not a place I can point at, which took me a long time to be able to say without embarrassment. It is a set of conditions: a particular quality of light in the late afternoon, buildings of a certain height, distance measured in walking rather than in kilometres.
Belonging, I have decided, is mostly habit. You belong where you know what happens next — where the shops shut, which queue moves, what the silence means. Nostalgia is the belief that this was ever about the place itself.
Seven statements. Decide which extract each is true of. An extract may be the answer more than once.
A Written for insiders
B Written for outsiders
C The geography
D The reflection
1. Uses the for things the reader has never met, because the writer assumes they have.
2. Introduces almost everything with a, because nothing can be assumed.
3. Uses no article at all for its central ideas, because they are meant generally.
4. Takes the with rivers and mountain ranges, and none with the country.
5. Describes a loss that is not the loss the article was about.
6. Says that attachment is really a form of knowing what happens next.
7. Reports a local dispute at a careful distance, marked as second-hand.
Read A and B again, side by side. Same town, same market, same cinema. In A it is the old cinema; in B it is a disused cinema. Nothing about the cinema changed. What changed is who is being written to.
The geography, and the sound of an article
Places that take the, and places that do not
| Takes the | Takes nothing |
|---|---|
| Rivers, seas, oceans — the Douro, the Atlantic | Lakes — Lake Como |
| Mountain ranges — the Alps, the Serra da Estrela | Single mountains — Everest, Ben Nevis |
| Plural country names — the Netherlands, the Philippines, the USA | Most countries — Portugal, Brazil, France |
| Regions — the north, the Alentejo, the Middle East | Continents — Africa, Europe |
| Groups of islands — the Azores, the Canaries | Cities, towns, villages — Coimbra, Leeds |
| Deserts — the Sahara | Streets — Rua Amélia, Oxford Street |
And the institution pattern, which is not geography but behaves like it.
She’s at school — she is a pupil. She’s at the school — she is at that building, perhaps to fix the boiler.
He’s in hospital — he is ill. He’s in the hospital — he is inside the building.
They’re at university — they are students. They’re at the university — they are visiting one.
No article means using it for what it is for. The means the building. Portuguese uses the definite article in both, which is why this distinction has to be learned rather than felt.
Why you do not hear them. Articles carry no stress in English, ever. the is /ðə/ before a consonant and /ði/ before a vowel; a is /ə/, never /eɪ/ unless somebody is being emphatic. In at the end of our street the article is the quietest thing in the phrase.
Say the four extracts’ first lines aloud with the articles fully reduced. If an article sounds like a word, it is too loud.
Four sentences have been removed from a fifth extract. Put each one back where it belongs.
The village has one shop, and it has had one shop since before anybody currently living there was born. [1]
It is nine miles from the nearest town, along a road that floods twice a winter. [2] Nobody has ever suggested raising the road, because raising the road would cost more than the village is generally felt to be worth.
[3] Young people leave, which is said with a fatalism that suggests it is weather rather than economics.
What is odd is how little any of this is resented. [4] A place that has been overlooked for long enough stops noticing, and starts to prefer it.
Insider, outsider, geography
Eight sentences. Choose the article.
1. The Douro rises in ___ Spain.
2. She grew up in ___ Netherlands.
3. They climbed ___ Everest in 2019.
4. We drove across ___ Alentejo in August, which was a mistake.
5. My brother is in ___ hospital — he broke his ankle.
6. I’m meeting her at ___ hospital, by the main entrance.
7. He lives on ___ Oxford Street, above a shop.
8. We spent a week in ___ Azores.
Seven sentences. One article error each.
1. I was born in the Portugal.
2. We swam in Atlantic every morning.
3. She is at the university in Lisbon. — she is a student
4. The Everest is visible from the valley on clear days.
5. He works in a north of the country.
6. The nature is the reason people move there.
7. We stayed in small village near the coast.
Rewrite it for the other reader
Task card · Pairs · 12 minutes · Writing then speaking
Take extract A — written for people who live there — and rewrite it for somebody who has never been. Then take one paragraph of extract B and rewrite it for a neighbour.
Six minutes writing, six comparing with the pair beside you.
- Going outward: every the that rested on shared knowledge has to become a, or be explained.
- Going inward: everything explained can be assumed, and the paragraph gets much shorter.
- Count the articles you changed in each direction. The numbers are not the same.
- Say what each version assumes its reader already has. Be specific — not "local knowledge" but which fact.
What you are testing. Neither version is better English. The difference between them is a model of somebody else’s head, and it is carried almost entirely by two of the shortest words in the language.
What the rewrite exposed
Two questions.
1. Going from insider to outsider, what happened to the length?
2. Which extract was hardest to rewrite?
The reader decides
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Why is it the old cinema in one text and a disused cinema in the other?
2. She’s at school against She’s at the school?
Next. The whole system in one lesson — generic against specific, abstract nouns, and the three different ways English says dogs in general.