A pronoun question tests whether you can match a pronoun to the person or thing it stands for. Read across the sentence break to find who owns the noun after the blank. Then check each form's meaning: contractions combine words and use apostrophes for missing letters, while possessive pronouns show ownership. A possessive pronoun must match the owner's number and whether the owner is a person or thing. The nearest noun may not be the owner.
Hints
- Hint 1
Look at the noun immediately after the blank. What does the missing word need to tell you about that noun?
- Hint 2
Read the first sentence and ask whose approach the second sentence describes. Once you've found that owner, is it one person, one thing, or more than one?
Step-by-step
Find the owner, then match the pronoun
Step 1Check ownership and expand the contraction
The blank sits before innovative approach, so the missing word must tell us whose approach it is. Sort the forms by number, meaning one or more, and expand the contraction He's. Does he is or he has work there? Neither makes sense before that noun, since transformed already tells us what the approach did. We need a possessive pronoun, which shows ownership.
- Step 2
Trace the approach to its owner
Whose innovative approach changed packaging? Read back across the period to glass artist René Lalique revolutionized the perfume industry by designing bottles: Lalique came up with the bottle designs, and the second sentence describes the effect of that work. The bottles, their forms, and their contents sit closer to the blank, but those words tell us about the things he designed and the perfume inside them. The approach is the way Lalique did that work, so Lalique is the owner of the approach.
- Step 3
Match the owner to the pronoun
Now use glass artist René Lalique to check both number and person: the owner is one person, not a thing or a group. Its shows ownership by a thing, while Their would point to more than one owner here. Which possessive form names one person's approach? His, the possessive form of he, shows whose approach it is without adding a verb. Choice C.