Introduction
Three of the most heavily tested areas in every Bangladeshi competitive exam — BCS (Preliminary and Written), Bank (Sonali, Rupali, Combined, Bangladesh Bank AD), and IT-officer written papers — are articles, prepositions, and determiners. They look small, but examiners love them precisely because they expose whether you think in English or merely translate from Bangla. A single wrong preposition ("married with" instead of "married to") or a missing/extra article ("He is honest man" instead of "an honest man") is enough to lose the mark.
This lesson builds the topic from first principles: what these words actually do in a sentence, the exact rules with their logic (not blind memorization), the fixed idiomatic combinations that exams recycle year after year, and the traps that Bangla-speaking candidates repeatedly fall into. Master this and you convert a large, reliable block of MCQ and fill-in-the-blank marks into guaranteed points.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Define articles, prepositions, and determiners and explain how each functions inside a sentence.
- Apply the rules for a / an / the and the zero article correctly, including sound-based (not spelling-based) selection of a vs an.
- Choose the correct preposition of time, place, direction, and agency, and recall the high-frequency fixed prepositional combinations (appropriate prepositions) tested in exams.
- Distinguish and correctly use determiners — demonstratives, possessives, quantifiers, distributives, and numbers — and know their ordering.
- Diagnose and avoid the most common Bangla-interference mistakes.
- Solve exam-style MCQ, fill-in-the-blank, and correction items with a repeatable method.