One of the biggest problems that ESL students face while learning English is an inability to use prepositions correctly. Although prepositions are small words, they can be quite confusing. Test your knowledge of prepositions with the grammar exercise.
A passage is given below with some blank spaces. You have to fill in the blanks using an appropriate preposition.
There are of course no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men and women; my devotion………………1…………… reading has never made me a recluse. How could it? Books are ………………2………………….. the people, by the people. Literature is the immortal part …………………..3……………….. history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality. But book-friends have this advantage …………………4………………… . living friends; you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society …………………5………………… the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible; as for our personal friends and acquaintance, we cannot always see them. Perchance they are asleep, or a way …………………..6………………… a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse ………………….7………………….. Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men ………………..8………………. their best. They wrote for you. They ‘laid themselves out’, they did their ultimate best ………………..9………………. entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look …………………..10………………….. their inmost heart of heart.
Answers
1. my devotion to reading
2. for the people
3. immortal part of history
4. advantage over living friends
5. aristocratic society in the world
6. a way on a journey
7. converse with
8. men at their best
9. best to entertain you
10. look into their inner most heart
