GMAS 5th Grade English Language Arts (ELA) Practice Test

Showing ownership with possessive nouns means adding 's to a singular noun to indicate that something belongs to that one owner. The sentence The dog's bone is missing uses the possessive form correctly: dog is singular, so you add 's to show that the bone belongs to that one dog, and the noun bone is singular, which matches with the singular verb is.

The other options run into problems. When the owner is singular but the thing owned is plural, the possessive still uses 's, but the verb must agree with the plural noun if you meant more than one bone. Here the form would need are missing. Leaving out the apostrophe entirely (The dogs bone) isn’t correct for possession. And using the plural possessive dogs' with a singular bone (The dogs' bone) is grammatically possible only if multiple dogs share one bone, which changes the meaning and isn’t the standard way to express a single-owner scenario. The standard, most natural choice for a single owner and a single item is The dog's bone is missing.