Question

My grandmother was ___ old lady. ___ parents left me with her. Choose the most appropriate word to fill the blank.

Answer 1

Hint: There are a few words which accompany the subject and the object and modify their meanings. In other words, these words specify the nouns. They are known as articles. These articles are called ‘determiners’ because it denotes the positions of distinct nouns in the sentence.

Complete answer:
1. As discussed above, articles that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases.
2. There are mainly two types of articles used in English grammar. They are, ‘The Definite Article’ and ‘The Indefinite Article’.
3. Definite articles limit the meaning of a noun to one particular thing. The definite article can be used with singular, plural, or uncountable nouns. There is only one definite article in English grammar- ‘the’.
4. Unlike definite articles, Indefinite Articles indicates that a noun refers to a general idea rather than a particular thing. They can be used before nouns depending on their beginnings. When a word begins with a consonant (bat), ‘a’ is used to specify it. Whereas ‘an’ will be used if the noun begins with a vowel (apple). The indefinite article only appears with singular nouns.
5. Now that we know what articles are, let us move on to the sentence given to us in the question. We know that there are three articles used in English grammar. So, in order to fill in the blank with a suitable article, we shall check each article one by one.
6. We shall first fill in the blank of the first sentence and will later move on to the next one.
7. We know that words beginning with vowels are preceded with ‘an’ (as we can see in the sentence, ‘My grandmother was _ _ _ old lady.’). Therefore, ‘an’ will come before ‘old lady’.
8. If we look at the first sentence, ‘My grandmother was an old lady’, we can notice that the speaker is the grandchild of the old lady we are talking about. And, in the next sentence, ‘_ _ _ parents left me with her.’, we can see that none of the articles will fit here. Thus, we will use ‘My', which is a possessive adjective which expresses the relationship between the noun 'parents' and the speaker.

Hence the correct sentence should be, ‘My grandmother was an old lady. My parents left me with her.’

Note: Sentences are formed by a few grammatical elements that bring out their basic meaning. These elements can be subject, object, verb and helping verbs. In this question, we studied about articles. But somewhat, we have to use ‘my’ as a possessive adjective in the first place of the second sentence. It says “My parents left me with her”.