confused with article

[Zomac]

Thanks a lot for all your advices. The proper use of articles remains quite a difficult job for me but I have much better understanding on it now.

I find anonymoose's example on "going to (a/the/nil) school" illustrative and easier to follwo. Also thanks for Altair, Glenn and SiMaKe for the indepth information.

[jbradfor]

I know Zomac just posted this as an example of usage of articles, but in case anyone else wants more information on the flight: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/green-tech/solar/six-questions-about-the-solar-impulse-plane . It's pretty interesting, actually.

[Zomac]

the plane is great but i wouldn't give a ride without a parachute!

A further off-topic question: Why don't civilian fights equip everyone with parachutes?

[jbradfor]

I haven't done the math, but I'm sure it's very very very not cost effective.

The number of deaths worldwide due to airplane crashes is actually quite low. The number of those deaths that might reasonably be prevented if people had parachutes is just a small fraction of those. [e.g. parachutes won't help if you crash into a mountain during landing.] For parachutes to be useful, you'll need at least 10-15 minutes warning to get everyone off the plane. I have a hard time imagining a situation in which both you have that much warning and there is something critically wrong. A multiple-engine failure at cruising attitude is the only one that comes to mind, and short of having your engines destroyed by flying though volcanic ash, that's not very common.

[Jane_PA]

Wow, I will study this post later. This is a long and nice discussion of (the) articles. hehe.

Sometimes, I feel it is more diffcult to figure out how to use article in front of the abstract nouns, like for my research. There are many words like technology, information, idea, adoption, usage, behavior etc.