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Первое здание — школа, а девятое — наша больница.

Первое здание — школа, а девятое — наша больница.
The first building is a school, and the ninth is our hospital.
From Lesson 102:Ordinal numbers 1st to 10th·Russian

Questions & Answers about Первое здание — школа, а девятое — наша больница.

Why do we use первое and девятое instead of первый and девятый?
Ordinal numbers act exactly like adjectives in Russian. They must match the gender, number, and case of the noun they describe. Because they describe здание (building), which is a neuter noun in the Nominative case, we use the neuter forms первое and девятое instead of the masculine dictionary forms первый and девятый.
Why is there no noun after девятое?
Just like in English, you can drop the noun if it is already obvious from the context. Here, девятое means "the ninth one" and stands in for девятое здание (the ninth building). Since the implied noun is still the neuter здание, the ordinal number stays in its neuter form.
If школа is feminine, why does the sentence start with the neuter word первое?
The ordinal number первое modifies the subject здание (building), which is neuter. The fact that this building happens to be a школа (a feminine word) does not change the grammatical gender of the word здание. Modifiers always match the specific noun they are attached to!
Why use the conjunction а here instead of и for "and"?
The conjunction а is used to show a slight contrast or to shift focus between two different subjects. While и just adds similar things together, а compares them (similar to saying "whereas" or "while" in English). Because we are contrasting what the first building is with what the ninth building is, а is the natural choice.
Why are there long dashes (—) in both parts of this sentence?
In the present tense, Russian does not use a verb for "is" or "are." When you are stating that one noun is another noun, Russian writers often use a long dash (called an em dash) to connect them. Here, the dashes literally stand in for the word "is".

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