Which is the correct usage?
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"We live in a big house with a white door."
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"We live in the big house with a white door."
This question was asked in a competitive exam that I took. No other context was provided, just this single sentence. It's a fill in the blank question; the blank part to be filled is "the" big / "a" big. Which article is right?
We are using British English. Moreover the provisional key is showing "the" as the correct answer. I don't know on what basis they are using "the" as the correct one without any context. We need to report the complaint with proper explanation.
Best Answer
They mean different things.
This is a relatively standard description of the house one lives in, but the listener is not meant to actually know what house you are referring to.
This is a relatively strange description because of the mismatch "the"/"a". You are indicating that you expect the listener to know what house you are referring to, but not which door. This suggests, for example, that the door is interior to the house and is of some sort of importance to the listener, rather than being an arbitrary identifying characteristic:
Most likely you would instead see a completely different statement,
This is a relatively standard identification of which house belongs to you, out of a collection of other houses where some of them have white doors but one in particular stands out as "big".