Primary School English Quiz - Prepositions 3 - Find the Prepositions (Questions)

Have a look at these sentences:

“The plane flew OVER Mount Everest.”

"They stood BEHIND him.”

“I stood BELOW the bridge.”

In these sentences you will notice the words in capitals are related to a noun or a pronoun. From your study of the previous two quizzes you would have surmised that these words are prepositions. The pronoun or noun that follows the preposition is the object of the preposition.

In the previous two quizzes we understood how prepositions were used to give a sense of the place, time or direction in a sentence. We also learnt that certain specific prepositions are used to convey certain specific meaning in relation to place, time or direction. Apart from conveying meaning in relation to place, time and direction a preposition is used in relation to the object of the preposition.

Have another look at the three sentences at the beginning of this introduction. You can see in the first example there are two nouns – 'plane' and 'Mount Everest'. Here, the preposition OVER is used in relation to Mount Everest, the object of the preposition. Similarly in the second sentence BEHIND is the preposition and the object of the preposition is 'him', a pronoun. In the third sentence BELOW is the preposition and the object of the preposition is 'bridge', a noun.

You can see that prepositions play an important role in allowing precise and pertinent information to be communicated to the reader. Even though the number of prepositions is very few (compared to adjectives, nouns or verbs) they are used quite regularly and hence assume importance. The common prepositions used along with objects are DOWN, BELOW, UNDER, AFTER, ON, IN, BESIDE and ABOVE. Remember that it is possible to use the same preposition in relation to different contexts such as direction, place, time or object. The quiz that follows gives you examples of how to identify objects of prepositions.