THE is known as a definite article...
Which in essence means the use of the word THE defines which object is in question...
i.e.
The Cat that lives on Elm Street ate my fish
It was THE cat living on Elm Street as oposed to any other cat...
out of all the cats who could of possibly ate my fish, it was the one that lives on ELM
Vs the indefinite article ("A")
A cat that lives on Elm...
It was one of many cats living on Elm...
SO I went into THE Wal-Mart down Town..
Identifies a particular Wal-Mart
Whereas...
I went into (A) Wal-Mart down town
does not specify which particular store you visited, only that it was from the Wal-Mart chain of stores....
In English the indefinite article (a) is often left out, and is qually correct, unless one is trying to specify a particular number of items... such as in my CAT eating FISH example...
THE Cat from Elm street ate fish...
THE CAT who lives on Elm (only one cat in our sample lives on Elm, possibly others that live elsewhere), ate fish...
The CAT from ELm ate A fish...
as fish can be either singular or plural the indefinite article helps to specify a number of fish, A as oposed to TWO, or THREE fish...
I believe that many asian languages do not have any articles, definite or indefinite, thus we get many lovely examples of poor translations that read like pigeon...found all over the web...
