Question 62·Medium·Form, Structure, and Sense
With temperatures dipping well below freezing, the Antarctic winter can be brutal for an emperor penguin colony, yet _____ to huddle tightly together allows its members to conserve warmth.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
For possessive-noun questions, first decide whether the noun should be singular or plural by checking the main noun earlier in the sentence and any pronouns (its/their) that refer to it. Then decide if you need a possessive at all—if the next word is something the noun owns or has (like “ability,” “members,” or “habitat”), you usually need an apostrophe form. Eliminate options that change singular to plural incorrectly or that fail to show possession when it is clearly needed.
Hints
Look at the surrounding nouns and pronouns
Focus on “an emperor penguin colony” earlier in the sentence and “its members” later. Ask yourself whether the sentence is talking about one group or more than one.
Think about possession
The word “ability” needs to be connected to whoever has that ability. Ask yourself: what is the usual way in English to show that something belongs to a noun (for example, in a phrase like “the dog tail” vs. another, more natural form)?
Match number and form
Make sure the form you choose both (1) fits a single colony and (2) correctly shows that the ability belongs to that colony.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify what the blank is describing
Read the full sentence: it talks about “an emperor penguin colony,” and then says that something “allows its members to conserve warmth.” The blank is right before the word “ability,” so the missing phrase should tell us whose ability it is (who has this ability).
Decide on singular vs. plural
Earlier in the sentence, we see “an emperor penguin colony” (singular) and later “its members,” which also refers back to that single colony (if it were plural, it would say “their members”). So the noun referring to the group should stay singular: colony, not colonies. This eliminates any option that uses colonies.
Choose the correct possessive form
We need to show that the ability belongs to the colony, so we need the possessive form of the singular noun colony. The correct singular possessive is colony’s, which matches “an emperor penguin colony” and the pronoun “its.”
Correct answer: B) the colony’s ability.