Using prepositions in a sentence can cause lots of headaches, especially ‘At’, ‘On’, and ‘In’. Each relates to the information about time, location, and direction. If you are not a native English speaker, this may be quite confusing at times. In fact, different prepositions when used with the same words change the meaning of a sentence.
In this lesson, I am going to provide you with some simple tricks to use these very common but useful prepositions. It is important that you also learn the pattern of using these three prepositions.
Let us start with “In”. We will cover “At” and “On” separately in the next sessions and then share a comparison table. The scenarios and examples below are common and indicative ones, not explicit.
| Area of use/ Scenario | Examples |
|---|---|
| Weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, centuries, long periods | in the 3rd week of January, in August, in summer, in 2020, in the 1900s, in a few days, in the Stone Ages |
| As a group of words and expressions | in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, in the past, in the future, in five minutes, in a few minutes |
| Being or within something, inside the edges of something, inside places surrounding a person or objects | In the water, in the desk, in the lake, in the team, in the mountains |
| Containers or enclosed spaces | mobile in my pocket, music in the car, seats in the bus, in the library, in the theatre |
| Building and rooms | in the room, in my office, in an apartment |
| Location, place, areas, regions, cities | in a hotel, in a park, in India, in Dusseldorf, in the city, in the country |
| Shapes, color and size | in red, in a circle, in five different sizes |
| Liquids | Sugar in soft drinks, milk in your tea, coffee in my cup, water bottle in the fridge |
| With group of people or surrounded by people Exception: member of high level groups | in the people, in the marketing team, in the soccer team, in the house of parliament, Exception for high level groups: on the board, on the committee |
| Indicating belief, interest, opinion, feeling | in the next life, not interested in poker, strong belief in humanity, in despair, express in better ways, believe in hardworking |
| Expression of doing something or action | in preparing the report, in buying from the super market |
Stay tuned! In the next posts of this series, I will cover the use of preposition “At” and “On”.
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