ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by a spider’s abdomen.

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We understand if that skeeves you out a little bit.

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all? its?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Let’s begin by reading the entire sentence in which the underlined segment appears.

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“A spider has up to eight eyes, eight legs and seven silk-producing glands in its abdomen.”

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Eight, eight, and...seven? A little random, Mother Nature.

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The underlined word is a possessive pronoun that tells us these abdomens belong to spiders.

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It’s up to us to comb through the answer choices to make sure we have the possessive

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form of the pronoun “it.”

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Option (B) is incorrect because “it’s” with an “apostrophe s” is a contraction,

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like it is, not a possessive pronoun.

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Reminder: contractions are a shortened form of a word or group of words in which the missing

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letters are usually marked by an apostrophe.

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In this contraction, the apostrophe stands for the “i” in “is”...

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Which, for whatever reason, most people are too lazy to say in everyday conversation.

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Answer (D) takes the time to say “is,” but it shouldn’t have bothered.

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This sentence doesn’t need another verb floating around...

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So (D) is off the list.

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Choice (C) gives us plain old “it.” Wow, (C), it’s like you were barely even trying.

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“It,” of course, is a simple singular pronoun and isn’t possessive at all.

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This is probably nice for the significant other of It...

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But this doesn’t help the sentence in question.

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Turns out the original sentence was all right.

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“Its” with no apostrophe is, in fact, the possessive form of the pronoun “it.”

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We’re guessing Its significant other has a tougher time.

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