几乎没有人不知晓在特指情况下要用“the”，所以，在撰写这篇小短文之前，笔者还在犹豫，探讨一个人人皆知的“the”会不会引起大家的误解？

然而，在多年的英文编辑和英文论文润色过程中笔者发现不少作者在“the”的使用上犯了不该犯的“低级”错误，具体表现在：该用的时候没有用，不该用的时候却用了，有的作者甚至在所有名词前面都加上“the”，给编辑造成一种“莫名其妙”和“画蛇添足”的混乱感觉。下面结合一些实例“抛砖引玉”“the”的正确用法。

1. 在特指情况下要加“the”。例一：A natural and normal gait can be used as a biometric cue in finding a solution to the human identification problem. An individual׳s appearance is likely to change with the variation in different clothes which further compounds the problem of gait identification. The clothing differences between gallery and probe datasets capture the possible changes in their silhouette׳s shape which increases the inability to discriminate between individuals.

例二：Earthquake-induced displacements of landslides are significantly conditioned by their 1D and 2D interactions with seismic waves, as currently proven by several studies. Nevertheless, the role of a more complex geological setting, responsible for a heterogeneous composition of the landslide mass, can significantly influence these phenomena. The heterogeneity can also depend on multiple phases of the landslide activity, responsible for dislodging the whole landslide mass into submasses, each one delimited by secondary scarps and characterized by individual mobility.

例三：Despite decades of research, predictive methods remain unavailable to estimate flame propagation in dust clouds under industrial scenarios. The complexity of scaling the fundamental processes occurring in multiphase flames to industrial geometries, and a lack of tools to explore and extend knowledge in this area, may be key factors missing in the research literature. The main objective of this work is to verify the ability of a CFD model based on a unity Lewis number assumption to explore laminar burning velocity in coal dust clouds.... Lastly, the results of the current study provide a baseline that more comprehensive modeling methods may be compared to, which is currently missing in the literature.

例四：Three commercial inhibitors were investigated for their suitability in preventing the spontaneous combustion of noncaking coal (NCC) and gas coal (GC), two coals of low metamorphic grades. Simultaneous thermal analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and kinetic analysis demonstrated that Zn/Mg/Al-CO3-layered double hydroxides (LDHs) and diammonum phosphate ([NH4]2HPO4) both exhibited substantial inhibiting effects. Therefore, Zn/Mg/Al-CO3-LDHs and (NH4)2HPO4 may be used for the prevention of spontaneous coal combustion. The reaction mechanisms and kinetic models for NCC and GC mixed with inhibitors were also determined.

2. 论文题目、著作章节名称的开头一般不要“the”。例一：Spontaneous combustion of coals and coal-shale；例二：Tectonic control of complex slope failures in the Ameka River Valley (Lower Gibe Area, central Ethiopia): Implications for landslide formation；例三：Characterization and quantification of path dependency in landslide susceptibility；例四：Fusion of sparse representation and dictionary matching for identification of humans in uncontrolled environment；例五：Chapter 10 - Information Security Program Metrics.

3. 公式、方程、图表、章节、页码等后面跟数字表示“第…时”前面不要加“the”。例一：The result will be discussed in Chapter 10; 例二：Figure 5 shows the model of the rainfall-induced landslide; 例三：You can find the answer to this question on Page 35.

4. 学科名称前面一般不加“the”。例一：The Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) in civil engineering faces several challenges；例二：We provide a brief overview of the status quo and the potential role that Cognitive Architectures may serve in the fields of Computational Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.

5. 摘要后面的关键词（keywords）前面不要加“the”。