Opened (the/a) scoring for

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Hi I'm reading a sport article and saw:"Kim Young-gwon opened the scoring for South Korea against Germany in added time."https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/27/football/ger...I don't know why they used definite article because to me, it can be just "a scoring" or just no article at all "opened scoring". So I thought of the reason and guessed that the reader is already informed of this scoring in the article's beginning and the line is for the picture, making it an already-known fact for the reader so it's natural to use definite article "the"Is my guess right?And one more question:Why using "in added time" instead of "in an added time" or "in the added time"?From what I know, I think it should be in "an" added time since it's not specified nor introduced to the reader about how much time was given. Thank you for reading it and have a nice day!

GPY · Accepted Answer

Neither of these questions seems easy to me.

sung min LeeSo I thought of the reason and guessed that the reader is already informed of this scoring in the article's beginning and the line is for the picture, making it an already-known fact for the reader so it's natural to use definite article "the" Is my guess right?

Even if there had been no previous mention of scoring, we would still normally say "opened the scoring" and not "opened scoring". A partial explanation may be that everyone already understands from general knowledge that there is (potentially) scoring in a football game. However, there are other contexts in which "scoring" is used in a more-or-less similar sense without an article (e.g. "Scoring proved easy for both teams"), so this explanation does not seem entirely sufficient. There seems to be a difference in the perception and treatment of the word "scoring" in these different contexts, possibly related to the extent to which it seems properly uncountable.

sung min LeeAnd one more question:Why using "in added time" instead of "in an added time" or "in the added time"? From what I know, I think it should be in "an" added time since it's not specified nor introduced to the reader about how much time was given.

In the phrase "added time", the word "time" is uncountable, so "an added time" does not work. "in added time" and "in the added time" are subtly different. In the first case, "added time" is a sports-related set phrase which by convention does not normally take an article. In the second case, "added time" is an ordinary descriptive phrase, and the definite article indicates that the reader already knows about this time that has been added. Even though the meaning seems to amount to the same, the distinction can affect how we use articles.

Opened (the/a) scoring for

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