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In contexts such as... "See who's at the door" "Put it on the table" "Look out of the window" ...it would normally be "unusual" to use the indefinite article (a instead of the), even if there were s …

Personally, I think phloem, xylem are usually better treated as mass nouns, which don't use the definite article. But the cited usage is at least "acceptable" either way. I'm more familiar with skin t …

Including the article in OP's context more strongly implies all [of the] wetlands were drained. Without it, we might well suppose the optional but unspecified "determiner" here could have been, for ex …

Both forms are in common use... It's normally entirely a stylistic choice whether to include the article or not. If a specific "protocol" has been previously mentioned, I'd say the article is more li …

Idiomatically, OP's first version is the most natural - but with the inclusion of a pronoun... ...hence... What is it best to serve at our dinner party? I wouldn't say it's syntactically invalid to …

Usage is changing over time in this context, which just goes to show that classifying nouns as "countable" or "uncountable" isn't always particularly useful... So far as I'm concerned, all three of O …

All three versions occur... ...and for the exact context as specified1, it doesn't really make any difference which you choose. They all mean the same, they're about equally common, and they're all t …

Interestingly, the cited example is one where usage has changed significantly over the last century... (It's the same when restricted to AmE or BrE corpus, so it looks like a global phenomenon.) …

I've no research to back this up, but my guess is that for most of the history of the English language, most native speakers lived in places where there was only one road/street in the local area anyw …

Only OP's second example (with the definite article the) is idiomatically valid in this exact sentence. But it would (just about) be possible to say There is an under-mirror washbasin. That particula …

There's nothing remotely "ungrammatical" about the cited usage (with or without a leading article). Google Books offers some support for OP's idea that the article "should" be present... 1: [Somet …

I'd say that in OP's example, plural bananas refers to "bananas in general" and "more than one banana" simultaneously, just as Monkeys like a banana simultaneously refers to "bananas in general" and " …

The cited context is inherently "flawed, awkward", since it's using the copula form [cannot] be to link singular our country and plural [the] victims. But we could resolve that with, say,... We ca …

With sand and coral, it's simply a matter of whether you're talking about the substance in general, or some specific example of it that has already been mentioned (or is contextually obvious). With t …

Question 1 in these contexts is effectively a "proper noun" (it identifies one specific thing). For the same reason why we don't refer to the1 OP as the Riko, we don't use a definite article when ref …