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Which Choice Properly Indicates Possession? 346 Views


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Description:

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 5. Which choice properly indicates possession?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Bus Seats.

00:06

There's no need for seat belts, because in an accident, a bus always wins.

00:11

How would you change the following sentence so that it is grammatically correct?

00:14

The bus' seats were so old that they were almost fossilized.

00:19

And here are your potential answers...

00:26

Alright, well... we're either dealing with some serious hyperbole here,

00:29

or we have a hundred-thousand-year-old bus on our hands.

00:32

How should bus be written?

00:34

That's a job for the apostrophe -- it expresses possession.

00:38

Wondering when to use it?

00:40

For most purposes, the two major ways we use apostrophes are to express possession

00:45

and to form a contraction. I am turns to I'm...

00:49

We are turns to we're...

00:52

Yeah...you get the idea.

00:54

Possession is shown by putting an apostrophe-S after the noun that is doing the possessing.

00:59

Say a cheap leprechaun has a pot of pyrite.

01:02

To express this, all you need to say is theleprechaun's pyrite.

01:06

What if it's a family of leprechauns?

01:09

Then it's multiple leprechauns' pyrite; you say it the same way, but when you write it,

01:14

you put the apostrophe after the S.

01:16

Because this problem is talking about possession -- the seats belong to the bus --

01:19

you need an apostrophe for sure.

01:21

So B and C get thrown out right away

01:23

We can also throw away A, because the bus isn't plural,

01:26

so the apostrophe S won't go after the S.

01:29

We're left with D -- which is the correct answer.

01:31

Bus seats. How germs get to school.

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