Exercise 39. Comment on the use of articles or their absence

1. You can't become prime minister at once. (Shaw) 2. I began once at a dinner to tell a good story. (Jerome K. Jerome) 3. The scene of yesterday was quite transformed. The sea was now pale and almost colourless, yet at the same time brilliant, a sea of liquid light. It merged without a boundary into a sky which at the horizon was of an equal pallor, though changing at the zenith to a very pale vibrating blue. Here and there in the far distance, as if suspended motionless between sea and sky, there were small sailihg-boats with triangular sails. (Murdoch) 4. Mr. Pickwick observed that fame was dear to the heart of every man. Poetic fame was dear to the heart of his friend Snodgrass; the fame of conquest was equally dear to his friend Tupman; and the desire of earning fame in the sports of the field, the air, and the water was uppermost in the breast of his friend Winkle. (Dickens) 5. The evening had already deepened into night. (Dreiser) 6. I know he couldn't love a Linton. (E. Bronte) 7. "John, dear," said Bella, "You're a good nurse; will you please hold baby?" (Dickens) 8. I must remind you again that Adam had the blood of the peasant in his veins. (Eliot) 9. She comes home to a late tea, and after tea she never sews. (Ch. Bronte) 10. He was already chairman of the department. (Wilson)~-ll. Thus he stood by the bank of thfs still lake... marvelling at the subtleties of reflected radiance, feeling the artist's joy in perfect natural beauty. (Dreiser) 12. This is Professor Hallorsen, who was head of the expedition. (Galsworthy) 13. Winter and summer a stove was burning in his room, stoked by Peter Saward's landlady, a Miss Glashan, who also brought him his meals and did the cleaning. (Murdoch) 14. George got out his banjo after supper and wanted to play it, but Harris objected. He said he had got a headache. George thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache. Harris said he would rather have the headache. (Jerome K. Jerome) 15. A full moon rode between the elm trees and there was silence as of the grave. (Galsworthy) 16. The world is all before him where to choose. A life of stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of domestic ease and love! (Dickens) 17. After all, we all live in the future, even if it's a future where we aren't to be found anywhere upon the earth. (Murdoch) 18. But, ere that moment, an astonishing and vivid experience happened to them. One might have supposed that, in the life of Priam Farle at least, enough of the astonishing and the vivid had already happened. (Bennett) 19. There was a certain dignity in the little elderly gentleman's manner of rebuking these youths; though it was not, perhaps, quite the dignity most appropriate to the occasion. (Ch. Bronte) 20. I went into the war when I was seventeen, ran away from school to do it, enlisting as a Tommy and telling them I was nineteen. (Priestley) 21. Phuong was drinking a glass of orange juice and I was having a beer and we sat in silence, content to be together. (Greene) 22. So it was that on the following day, which was a Saturday, Rosa was knocking on Mrs. Wingfield's door at about four o'clock. (Murdoch)