ShmoopTube

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

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

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

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

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And here are your potential answers...

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

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

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How should bus be written?

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

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Wondering when to use it?

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

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

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We are turns to we're...

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Yeah...you get the idea.

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

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Say a cheap leprechaun has a pot of pyrite.

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

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What if it's a family of leprechauns?

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

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you put the apostrophe after the S.

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

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you need an apostrophe for sure.

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So B and C get thrown out right away

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

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

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

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Bus seats. How germs get to school.

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