Hi, Irene. Can you provide a context for these examples? As best I can tell, you could omit the definite article in either case (e.g., “Consumption of chicken has increased over the past three years…” or “Chicken consumption has increased…”) on the basis that both are generalizations (i.e., you’re referring to chicken consumption in general, not one particular case of consuming chicken).

However, you’re also correct that “The consumption of chicken…” would be acceptable in the same generalized context, while “The chicken consumption…” would sound unnatural.

I’m not 100% sure on the reasons for this, as English can be a little inconsistent and its prone to exceptions to rules, but it might be because the definite article has a different implication when placed before a noun + prepositional phrase: i.e., in “The consumption of chicken…,” the definite article is totalizing (i.e., it implies that you’re discussing all consumption of chicken, not just some cases of it), whereas “The chicken consumption…” narrows the reference of the phrase, implying that you’re referring to a particular instance of someone eating chicken, compared to the unambiguously general “chicken consumption.”

I hope that helps to some extent, though let us know if you discover a more definitive answer at any point!

” The consumption of chicken” and “Chicken consumption”. Why don’t we need ” the” in the second phrase? Is it correct if I write ” The chicken consumption”?

Hi, Gopal. “Hospital” is one of those terms where you would drop the article were you referring to its function (e.g., “John was injured and taken to hospital”). But adding “nearest” means you’re referring to a singular, specific place, so you would need to say “John was injured in the accident and taken to the nearest hospital.”

Hi, Carmen. You would usually need an article with “platform” and “home” in those contexts since they don’t standardly have the same semi-abstract usage as “space,” but it’s an interesting thought as to how omitting the article might change their meaning.

Hi, Elle. In English, an article is always “a,” “an,” or “the.” Whether the zero article applies, then, depends on whether we omit these words from a sentence, not on whether the noun that follows is determinate or otherwise.

The key in the noun + number case is that we omit the article before the noun because the number helps us identify it instead. For instance, if we say “The picture is on the page,” we use “the” to indicate that we’re referring to a specific page. But if we say “The picture is on page 26,” the number already shows that we’re referring to a specific page, so we don’t need the article. And since we don’t use an article, it is an example of the “zero article.”

Don’t forget, too, that the zero article is used in many situations, but they differ in some respects. The case of a noun + number is similar to that of a proper noun, where we don’t use an article because the number indicates a unique entity in context (e.g., a book should only have one page 26, unless there has been a misprint, so we don’t need another determiner to identify it any more than we need to say “The Bono” to identify the frontman of U2 by his name). But with “go to bed,” by contrast, we use the zero article because we’re focusing on the purpose of the noun rather than its identity (i.e., while Sally probably has a bed in mind, the focus of “going to bed” is the idea of retiring to sleep, not picking out the specific bed she is sleeping in).

Hope this helps a bit!