Articles with Superlatives and Ordinals Exercises

Superlative adjectives almost always need "the" because they identify one specific thing that stands out from all the rest: "the tallest building," "the most interesting book," "the best restaurant in town." Without "the," the sentence sounds incomplete — "tallest building" alone is not natural English. Ordinal numbers (first, second, third) follow the same pattern: "the first time," "the second floor," "the third question."

There is one important exception: when a possessive word (my, your, his, her, our, their) comes before an ordinal, drop "the" — say "my first day" (not "the my first day"), "her second attempt," "our third visit." You can also leave out "the" before superlatives in informal speech when no noun follows: "Which film was best?" However, in writing and formal English, "the" is expected before superlatives. These rules are tested in Cambridge B1 Preliminary and IELTS, often in gap-fill and sentence transformation exercises where learners must decide whether "the" is needed.