Question

Among the following sentences, one has all the apostrophes correctly placed. Identify that correct sentence.
a. The cat’s illness was making its paws sore.
b. The cat’s illness was making it’s paws sore.
c. The cats’ illness was making its paws sore.
d. The cats’ illness’ was making its paws sore.

Answer 1

Hint: Apostrophes are punctuation marks which are used to describe possessive nature, omitting certain letters and depicting plural words. Such punctuation marks can change the intention of the word that is used in a certain circumstance. The sentence mentions only one cat and the paws belong to the same cat (possessive word).

Complete answer:
Now, from the options given above,

a. The cat’s illness was making its paws sore: is the correct format for the sentence. This is because we are talking about the illness of a single cat, hence, “cat’s”. Furthermore, differentiating “it’s” and “its”, the former is used in place of “ it is” or “ it has”, while the latter is used to describe a possession belonging to the subject.

b. The cat’s illness was making it’s paws sore: there is no need for the apostrophe for it’s, since it would expand to read as “it has”.

c. The cats’ illness was making its paws sore: there is only one cat and hence the word cats’ is wrong in this context.

d. The cats’ illness’ was making its paws sore: there is no need for the apostrophe in illness and cats. The sentence focuses on what the illness did to the cat.

Hence, Option a, is the correct answer.

Note: Don’t confuse Option a and b.
To give an example, a similar sentence to the one given in the question would be, “The dog’s legs which were caught in the trap caused its tendons to break”.
If I were to apply the format of Option b, here, it would read as “The dog’s legs which were caught in the trap caused it's/has tendons to break”, which is grammatically incorrect.