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About this tool
Practise in, on, at and other English prepositions of time, place and movement, with the governing rule shown after every answer.
A preposition drill tests the small words that fix a noun in time, place or direction — in, on, at, by, since, into, across — where English follows rules rather than logic. This drill draws graded sentences from four banks (time, place, movement and fixed pairs) and states the governing rule after each answer, so getting one wrong teaches the pattern instead of just marking a cross. Questions are drawn reproducibly, so the same set can be handed out twice, and the score reports right, wrong and unanswered separately.
Open English Preposition Drill on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Each item carries the rule that decides it, so mistakes turn into a pattern you can reuse.
Time, place, movement and fixed pairs can be practised one at a time instead of all mixed together.
Unanswered questions are counted separately from wrong ones, so the percentage is not flattered.
At goes with clock times and points (at 7 o'clock, at noon, at night), on goes with days and dates (on Monday, on 12 March), and in goes with anything longer — months, seasons, years, centuries and parts of the day (in July, in 1998, in the morning).
In treats a place as an enclosed area you are inside (in the box, in Mumbai, in the garden), while at treats it as a point or as a function (at the bus stop, at the airport, at a concert). Saying you are at the office means you are there working; in the office means physically inside the room.
Into shows movement to the inside of something and in shows position once you are there: he jumped into the pool, then stayed in the pool. The same contrast runs between onto and on — she climbed onto the roof and then sat on it.
Because these are fixed collocations, learned as pairs rather than derived from a rule: good at, bad at, brilliant at a skill; interested in, worried about, full of, apologise for. Reading them as whole phrases is far more reliable than trying to reason each one out.