Grammar, Spelling & Words

Correct answer: .

The word 'its' with no apostrophe is a possessive pronoun, part of the same small family as 'his', 'hers', 'ours', and 'theirs' — and none of those possessive pronouns ever take an apostrophe, even though every one of them shows ownership. An apostrophe only belongs in 'it's' when the word is a contraction standing in for 'it is' or 'it has', never when it means 'belonging to it'. That is exactly why the sentence about the company's logo is correct: 'its logo' means 'the logo belonging to it', a straightforward possessive with no contraction involved, so no apostrophe is needed. The sentence about the dog gets this backwards, adding an apostrophe to a possessive ('it's tail' should be 'its tail'). The two sentences about the weather make the opposite mistake: 'its a beautiful day' and 'its going to rain' are both really saying 'it is', which requires the contraction 'it's', so leaving the apostrophe out there is the error.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary entry for 'its'; BBC Bitesize KS3 English: Apostrophes

Correct answer: .

In everyday use, 'affect' is almost always the verb, meaning 'to influence' or 'to change', while 'effect' is almost always the noun, meaning 'the result' or 'the outcome'. The sentence about lighting changing how a room feels needs a verb describing an influence happening, so 'affect' is correct there. Swapping in 'effect' as a verb is wrong here because 'effect' as a verb has a narrow, different meaning — 'to effect' something means 'to bring it about or cause it to happen' (as in 'effect a change'), which does not fit describing lighting influencing a feeling. The two sentences that talk about 'the affect' and 'studied the affect' both need the noun for a result, which is 'effect', not 'affect' — 'affect' as a noun is a specialised psychology term for a person's visible emotional expression, not the everyday word for 'result' those sentences are reaching for.

Source: Merriam-Webster: 'Affect' vs. 'Effect'; BBC Bitesize commonly confused words guidance

Correct answer: .

A verb must agree with its true subject, which is the main (head) noun of the subject phrase — not whatever noun happens to sit closest to the verb inside a describing phrase. In 'the stack of old newspapers', the head noun is the singular 'stack' ('of old newspapers' just describes which stack), so the singular verb 'was' is correct. The ticket-price sentence makes the opposite mistake: its head noun is the singular 'price' ('of the tickets' only describes the price), so it needs 'is', not the plural 'are' that got pulled in by the nearby plural 'tickets'. The keys sentence has the reverse problem: its head noun is the plural 'keys' ('to the cabinet' just describes which keys), so it needs the plural 'have', not the singular 'has' pulled in by the nearby singular 'cabinet'. The recipe sentence fails the same way as the price sentence: the head noun is singular 'recipe', so it needs 'needs', not 'need'.

Source: BBC Bitesize KS3 English: Grammar — subject-verb agreement

Correct answer: .

Both 'the rain stopped' and 'the sun came out' are complete, independent clauses that could each stand alone as their own sentence, so joining two of them properly requires more than just a comma. Pairing a comma with a coordinating conjunction like 'and' is one correct way to link them, which is exactly what the second sentence does. Joining them with only a comma and no conjunction, as the first sentence does, is called a comma splice — a comma alone is too weak a joint for two complete clauses. Leaving out all punctuation, as the third sentence does, is a run-on sentence, an even weaker joint than a comma splice. The fourth sentence tries to combine two separate fixes at once — a semicolon (which can join independent clauses on its own) followed by the conjunction 'and' — but a semicolon and a coordinating conjunction are two different tools for the same job, and standard punctuation uses only one of them, not both together.

Source: BBC Bitesize GCSE English Language: Sentence punctuation and comma splices

Correct answer: .

The rule says the letters should appear as 'ei' right after a c, and as 'ie' everywhere else. 'Receive' and 'ceiling' both spell 'ei' immediately after a c, so they follow the rule exactly as taught. 'Believe' spells 'ie' with no c anywhere near it, which also follows the rule. 'Weird' is the one that actually breaks it: there is no c in the word at all, yet it is spelled 'ei' rather than the 'ie' the rule would predict for a non-c word — which is exactly why 'weird' is so often listed as the rule's most famous exception, memorably summed up in the fuller version of the rhyme that ends 'and weird is just weird'. In reality, English has so many other exceptions to this rule — words like 'seize', 'height', 'foreign', and 'protein' — that many spelling guides consider the rule unreliable overall, useful for a handful of common words but not something to trust blindly.

Source: Merriam-Webster: 'I Before E Except After C: Is It a Rule?'

Correct answer: .

In Old and Middle English — the language of Chaucer, hundreds of years ago — 'knight' really was pronounced with both sounds: the K at the start, and the GH as a throaty sound similar to the 'ch' in the Scottish word 'loch'. Over the following centuries, English pronunciation kept shifting and both of those sounds eventually dropped out of speech, but by then the spelling had already become fixed in writing (a process locked in further once printing presses started producing standardised copies of texts). So the K and GH survive today as a kind of fossil, a written record of how the word used to sound. 'Knight' actually comes from Old English 'cniht', a Germanic word, not from French, so the French explanation is invented. Early printers did help freeze spelling, but not to make words 'look important' — that motive is a myth. Likewise, the letters were never stress markers; English doesn't mark word stress with silent consonants at all.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary / Etymonline entry for 'knight'; description of Middle English pronunciation and spelling fixation via early printing

Correct answer: .

'Thrifty' and 'stingy' both point to essentially the same underlying behaviour: spending as little money as possible. What separates them isn't the behaviour itself but the attitude the word carries about it — its connotation. 'Thrifty' frames that behaviour positively, as sensible and admirable, while 'stingy' frames the very same behaviour negatively, as mean-spirited or excessive. This is exactly why writers choose one word over the other depending on whether they want to praise or criticise the same action. The claim that 'thrifty' is formal and 'stingy' is slang is false; both are standard, everyday words found in any dictionary. The claim that one describes spending and the other saving is also wrong, since both words are really about the same kind of careful spending, not opposite financial activities. The claim that only 'stingy' extends beyond money is not the real distinguishing feature either — both words can, in fact, be stretched to describe things like praise or effort.

Source: BBC Bitesize KS3 English: Denotation and connotation

Correct answer: .

The Greek word 'tele' meant 'far off' or 'at a distance', and that root shows up across a whole family of invention names that were all built to overcome distance in some way: the telephone carries sound over a distance, the television carries a moving picture over a distance, and the telescope (literally 'far-seeing', combining 'tele' with the Greek for 'to view') lets you see something that is physically far away as if it were close. Once you know the root means 'distance', it also unlocks other 'tele-' words like 'telegraph' (writing sent over a distance) and 'telepathy' (feeling sensed over a distance). 'Picture' is wrong because a telephone carries no picture at all. 'Electric' is wrong because plenty of electric devices with no connection to distance don't use the root, and a telescope isn't electric in the first place. 'Wire' is wrong because the root long predates telephone wires — the Ancient Greeks used 'tele' centuries before electricity existed, and a telescope has never needed a wire at all.

Source: Etymonline: 'tele-' prefix; Merriam-Webster WordPlay: 'Tele-: A Versatile Prefix'

Correct answer: .

These three words sound identical but do three completely different jobs. 'They're' is a contraction of 'they are', so it fits both times this sentence describes an action the group is doing ('they are going' and 'they are bringing'). 'There' refers to a place, so it correctly describes the location being met at. 'Their' shows possession, so it correctly describes the dog belonging to the group. The correct sentence uses all three in exactly those roles. Every other sentence swaps at least one of them into the wrong job: using 'their' or 'there' where an action is meant (instead of the contraction 'they're'), using 'their' or 'they're' where a location is meant (instead of 'there'), or using 'there' or 'they're' where ownership is meant (instead of 'their'). Because all three words sound exactly alike when spoken, the only way to tell them apart is by checking which job — action, place, or ownership — the word is doing in the sentence.

Source: BBC Bitesize KS3 English: Commonly confused homophones — there, their and they're

Correct answer: .

Without a comma separating the final two items in a list, a phrase like 'my parents, Anna and the librarian' can be read as one single description — as though 'Anna and the librarian' is renaming or identifying who the parents are, the same way 'my favourite author, Jane Austen' identifies one person. Adding a comma before 'and', as in sentence B, breaks that reading apart and signals instead that the list contains three separate items: the parents, then Anna, then the librarian. That extra comma is the whole difference in meaning between the two sentences. It is not a universal grammar requirement — plenty of respected style guides deliberately choose to leave it out in most lists, treating it as a style choice rather than a rule with 'no exceptions'. It has nothing to do with verb tense, so it cannot shift a sentence from past to present. And it is not merely decorative for reading aloud either — as this exact pair of sentences shows, it can genuinely change who the sentence says is being thanked.

Source: Scribbr: 'Oxford Comma | Definition, Examples & When to Use'

Correct answer: .

This is a real, predictable sound-change process called assimilation: the final "n" of the negative prefix "in-" shifts to match the sound that comes right after it, because that makes the word physically easier to say. Before the lip sounds p, b, and m, it becomes "im-" (impossible, imbalance, immoral); before l, it becomes "il-" (illegal, illiterate); before r, it becomes "ir-" (irregular, irresponsible); before every other sound, it stays "in-" (inactive, indirect, incomplete). This is not random spelling drift, so the claim that there is no pattern is wrong. It is also not a British-versus-American split — both varieties of English use "illegal" and "irregular," and "inlegal" or "inregular" are not accepted spellings in either. Finally, all of these forms genuinely descend from the single Latin negative prefix "in-"; they are not separate prefixes that coincidentally share a meaning, they are the same prefix reshaped by pronunciation.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary, etymology entries for "illegal," "impossible," and "irregular" (prefix "in-" assimilated to il-/im-/ir- before l, labial consonants, and r)

Correct answer: .

"Octopus" was borrowed by 18th-century scientists from the Greek "oktopous," meaning "eight foot," and only reached English by way of scientific Latin — it was never a genuine native Latin word. "Octopi" arose from the mistaken belief that any word ending in "-us" must be a Latin noun that pluralizes like "cactus" to "cacti"; because "octopus" is Greek in origin and, even in Greek grammar, not the type of noun that would form a plural that way, this reasoning does not hold up, which is why the option treating "octopi" as the only correct form is mistaken. The option claiming the word has no traceable origin is simply false; its Greek roots are well documented. A genuinely Greek-style plural would actually be "octopodes," not "octopi," so the option that uses the Greek origin to defend "octopi" gets the logic backwards. In practice, dictionaries treat "octopuses," built with the regular English plural ending, as the standard, safest choice, while "octopodes" is rare and "octopi" is widely considered etymologically incorrect.

Source: Merriam-Webster, "The Many Plurals of Octopus: Octopi, Octopuses, and Octopodes"

Correct answer: .

The phrase meaning "a large amount" is always written as two separate words, "a lot," and that is the only sentence here that spells it that way. Squashing it into a single word happens because the phrase sounds like one word when spoken quickly, but that single-word spelling is not a recognized word in standard English and is flagged as an error by dictionaries and grammar checkers alike. The version with a doubled letter is simply a typo with no separate meaning of its own. The version spelled "allot" is a real word, but it means something different: to allot something is to distribute or assign it, as in "the teacher will allot ten minutes per student," so using it here would describe dividing up fun rather than having a large amount of it. Only the two-word spelling correctly conveys "a large amount" while also being a standard, dictionary-recognized form.

Source: Merriam-Webster / Oxford English Dictionary, entry for "lot" ("a lot," two words, meaning a large number or amount; "alot" not a recognized spelling)

Correct answer: .

For most of English's history, piling up negative words was a normal way to intensify a statement, not a logic error — Chaucer's Canterbury Tales includes lines with three or four negatives in a row describing how thoroughly virtuous or admirable someone is, and Old English worked the same way. This was a genuine, widespread feature of the language, not a scribal mistake, so the option blaming Chaucer's spelling for the pattern is false. The shift came later: starting in the 16th century and hardening in the 18th, influential grammarians (most notably Bishop Robert Lowth) began treating English sentences the way mathematicians treat equations, arguing that two negatives should logically cancel into a positive, the way they do in arithmetic, and recommending against "double negatives" on those grounds; later writers like Lindley Murray repeated the advice, and it became the standard rule taught today. This change had nothing to do with the invention of the printing press, which predates the actual shift in attitude by well over a century and mainly affected spelling consistency, not grammar rules. It also had nothing to do with Shakespeare, who himself used double negatives freely in his own plays rather than banning them.

Source: Wikipedia, "Double negative" (citing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the 18th-century prescriptivist shift led by Robert Lowth); Oxford English Dictionary, historical usage notes on multiple negation in Old and Middle English

Correct answer: .

The traditional rule splits nouns into two types: countable nouns, which can be counted individually (items, apples, friends), pair with "fewer," while uncountable nouns, which describe a mass or amount that is not counted one at a time (water, time, money as a general concept), pair with "less." Since checkout items are counted individually, one, two, three, the historically correct wording is "fewer items," which is why the sign is a favorite target for grammar sticklers even though "less" is extremely common there in casual usage. This has nothing to do with British versus American English; both varieties teach the same countable/uncountable distinction, so the option splitting the words by country is invented. "Fewer" has also not fallen out of use — it remains the standard, taught form for countable nouns in formal writing, so treating it as obsolete is inaccurate. Finally, the distinction is about countability, not about time versus objects, so a rule based on that pairing does not match how the words actually work.

Source: Cambridge Dictionary, "Less or fewer?" (British Grammar); Wikipedia, "Fewer versus less" (countable vs uncountable noun rule)

Correct answer: .

"Who" is a subject pronoun, used for whoever is doing an action, while "whom" is an object pronoun, used for whoever is receiving an action — the same split as "he" versus "him" or "they" versus "them." A reliable test is to answer the question using one of those matching pronoun pairs: here, the natural answer is "I should invite him," not "I should invite he," which shows the missing word is functioning as an object, receiving the invitation rather than issuing it, so "whom" is required. The option testing with "he" gets the substitution backwards, since "I should invite he" does not sound natural, which is exactly why "who" fails the test here. Claiming the two words are fully interchangeable ignores that this subject/object distinction is still an active, teachable rule, even though "whom" is fading from casual speech. Restricting "whom" to formal letters is also inaccurate; it can appear correctly in any object position, spoken or written, formal or casual, whenever that grammatical test confirms it.

Source: Grammar Gecko, "Who vs Whom: The He/Him Test That Settles It Every Time"

Correct answer: .

"Loose," with a double "o" and an "s" sound like "goose," is an adjective meaning not tight or not fastened securely, which is exactly why a collar that isn't snug enough to stay on describes it correctly. "Lose," with a single "o" but a "z" sound, is a verb meaning to misplace something or fail to keep it, as in losing a ticket, so the sentence about the ticket needs that spelling instead of the adjective used in it. The sentence describing the collar with the single-"o" spelling makes the reverse mistake, using the verb where the loose-fitting adjective is required. The sentence mixing loose change and misplacing money gets the noun phrase "loose change" right but then repeats the same verb-for-adjective mix-up at the end, where losing the change should again use the single-"o" verb rather than the double-"o" adjective. Keeping the two straight comes down to remembering that the double "o" describes something not held tightly, while the single "o" describes the act of no longer having something.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary, entries for "loose" (adjective, not tight) and "lose" (verb, to misplace or fail to keep)

Correct answer: .

"i.e." abbreviates the Latin "id est," literally "that is," and is used to restate or clarify a term that has already been named, as in "her favorite subject, i.e., the one she studies most." "e.g." abbreviates "exempli gratia," literally "for the sake of an example," and introduces one or more representative items from a larger, open set, which is exactly what a hat, gloves, and a scarf are here: specific examples of warm clothing, not a restatement of what "warm clothing" means. Because the note lists examples rather than clarifying the phrase, it needed "e.g.," making the abbreviation choice the actual error, not the comma that follows it — both abbreviations are conventionally followed by a comma in this style, so the comma itself is not the problem. Both abbreviations remain standard in current English usage, in print and online, so dismissing them as unusable relics is inaccurate. Neither abbreviation is restricted to sentence-initial position either; both are most often used mid-sentence, exactly as in this note.

Source: Grammarly, "'i.e.' vs. 'e.g.' — What's the Difference?"

Correct answer: .

Read literally, "I could care less" claims that the speaker's level of caring is capable of decreasing further, which logically requires that some caring exists in the first place — the exact opposite of the total indifference the phrase is used to express. The original, logically consistent version, "I couldn't care less," says caring is already at its lowest possible point, with no room left to drop, which correctly captures complete indifference. "Could" and "couldn't" are not synonyms here; they are opposites, so treating them as interchangeable ignores the literal grammar of the sentence, even though both versions are used casually today with roughly the same intended meaning. The phrase says nothing about caring more about football than anything else, and nothing about being confused by scores — both of those readings invent a meaning the words never state. The mismatch between the literal wording and the intended meaning is exactly why this phrase is a favorite example of an idiom whose popular form doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny.

Source: Merriam-Webster, "Is it 'could' or 'couldn't care less'?"

Correct answer: .

The idea that 'to boldly go' is wrong comes from grammarians in the 1800s who wanted English to behave more like Latin, a language they considered more prestigious and logical. In Latin, the infinitive form of a verb is a single word that cannot be broken apart, so some grammarians reasoned that English infinitives -- even though they are actually made of two separate words, 'to' plus a verb -- should never be interrupted either. That reasoning does not really hold up, because English is not Latin and has never consistently followed Latin's rules for word order. By the early twentieth century, leading language authorities such as Henry Fowler and Otto Jespersen were already rejecting the restriction, and today's major style guides treat split infinitives as fully acceptable, often noting that keeping the adverb right next to the verb it modifies, as in 'to boldly go,' actually sounds more natural than the unsplit alternatives. The idea that this was ever a true ancient rule of English, that it was limited to formal or poetic contexts, or that it was invented specifically for science fiction are all invented explanations with no historical basis behind them.

Source: Merriam-Webster, 'To Boldly Go: Star Trek and the History of the Split Infinitive'; Fowler's Modern English Usage on split infinitives

Correct answer: .

The objection to a final preposition is generally traced to 17th-century figures such as Joshua Poole and the poet John Dryden, who judged earlier English prose against the standard of Latin, a language where a sentence truly cannot end on a preposition because of how its grammar is built. English works differently, relying on word order rather than Latin-style case endings, and speakers have ended sentences with prepositions since the Old English period -- it was never actually a foreign or incorrect pattern for English itself. Distinguished writers including Shakespeare and Jane Austen used the construction freely long before and after the rule was proposed, and virtually every modern style guide and dictionary now treats it as fully standard, reserving a phrase like 'with whom' for more formal registers rather than treating it as the only correct form. The claims about Old English speakers objecting to their own grammar, about a typing or telegraph-era space-saving habit, and about modern grammar-checking software are all fabricated explanations that don't match the documented history of the rule.

Source: Merriam-Webster coverage of ending sentences with prepositions; Atlas Obscura, 'Where the No Ending a Sentence With a Preposition Rule Comes From'

Correct answer: .

Both halves of the student's sentence -- 'I studied all week' and 'I still felt nervous before the exam' -- are complete sentences on their own, each with its own subject and verb. Joining two complete sentences with only a comma and no connecting word, as the original draft does, creates what's called a comma splice, a specific kind of run-on error. A semicolon is one of the punctuation marks built exactly for this situation: it can link two independent clauses that are closely related in meaning, letting them stand together as one sentence without a period breaking them apart and without needing a word like 'but' or 'and' to connect them. It is not simply an interchangeable stronger comma that can be dropped in anywhere for emphasis, it carries no instruction about tone of voice or volume, and its use has nothing to do with whether a particular word like 'still' appears in the sentence -- what actually matters is the grammatical relationship between the two clauses on either side of it.

Source: Purdue OWL, 'Commas and Semicolons'; Oxford style guidance on semicolons joining independent clauses

Correct answer: .

Unlike 'knight,' where the now-silent letters really were pronounced centuries ago before the spoken sound quietly dropped away, 'debt' never had a spoken 'b' at any stage of its history -- not in the Latin verb 'debere' (to owe), not in its Latin noun descendant 'debitum,' and not in the Old French 'dette' that English actually borrowed the word from. In the 1500s, scholars who admired Latin deliberately reinserted a 'b' into the spelling purely to make the word's Latin ancestry visually obvious on the page, giving similar treatment to related words like 'doubt' and 'subtle.' That means the silent 'b' was never lost from pronunciation, because it was never pronounced in English or French to begin with -- it was added in by scribes for visual, etymological reasons, not dropped by natural sound change. This makes it a genuinely different mechanism from 'knight,' where sound loss came first and the spelling froze in place afterward. There's no evidence of a printing accident or of a separate Germanic root merging in; both of those explanations are invented and unsupported by any documented history of the word.

Source: Merriam-Webster, 'Nobody Pronounces the B in Debt'; Etymonline entry for 'debt'

Correct answer: .

Greek nouns ending in '-on' commonly form their plural by swapping that ending for '-a,' and English preserved this pattern when it borrowed several such words directly from Greek, which is exactly why 'criterion' becomes 'criteria,' 'phenomenon' becomes 'phenomena,' and 'automaton' becomes 'automata.' Dictionaries do record a regular English alternative, 'criterions,' but it is rarely used, and 'criteria' remains the standard, expected plural; phrases that treat 'criteria' itself as a singular, saying 'this criteria' instead of 'this criterion,' are widely regarded as incorrect, since 'criteria' is properly only the plural form. The claim that 'phenomenon' regularly becomes 'phenomenons' misstates the actual convention, since 'phenomena' is the form that is actually standard there too, not an occasional exception. There is also no genuine restriction limiting 'criteria' to scientific writing only, and stacking an extra English '-s' onto the already-plural Greek form, producing 'criterias,' is never treated as a correct or standard form in any register.

Source: Merriam-Webster entries for 'criterion' and 'criteria'; Merriam-Webster entry for 'phenomenon'

Correct answer: .

'Whose' is a possessive word, showing that something belongs to someone, which is exactly the job it does in the sentence about the backpack: the backpack belongs to the student, so 'whose backpack' is correct. 'Who's,' by contrast, is a contraction standing in for 'who is' or 'who has,' and none of the other three sentences actually need a possessive at all. The sentence asking about the party is really asking 'Who is coming to the party,' so it needs the contraction 'who's,' not the possessive 'whose.' The sentence about the book is asking whose book it is, a genuine possessive situation, so using 'who's' there is backwards. The sentence about the early teacher is really saying 'the teacher who is always early,' another case that calls for the contraction rather than the possessive. Mixing these two words up is one of the most common homophone errors in English, precisely because they sound completely identical when spoken aloud.

Source: Oxford Dictionaries usage note on 'who's' vs. 'whose'; BBC Bitesize KS3 English: commonly confused words

Correct answer: .

'Alright' has actually been in written use for over a century, so it isn't a recent slang invention, and it does appear in many dictionaries as a recognized variant, particularly in informal writing such as text messages, casual emails, or dialogue in fiction. Even so, formal style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook continue to treat 'all right,' written as two words, as the standard, fully accepted form for careful or professional writing, while treating the one-word spelling as nonstandard in that same formal context, which is exactly why a teacher grading a formal report would flag it. The two spellings are not different words carrying different meanings, they are simply two competing spellings of the same meaning, so the option claiming a meaning split is invented. Nor is the distinction a matter of British versus American English, since both spellings appear on both sides of the Atlantic, with formality, not region, driving which one style guides prefer.

Source: Chicago Manual of Style, Q&A on 'alright' vs. 'all right'; Merriam-Webster usage note on 'alright'

Correct answer: .

Many English compound words follow a documented life cycle: they begin as two separate words (an 'open' compound), pick up a hyphen once the pairing becomes common enough to feel like a single idea, and eventually fuse into one solid word once that pairing becomes thoroughly familiar -- the same path that turned 'base ball' into 'base-ball' and finally into 'baseball.' 'E-mail' has followed a similar arc, moving from a hyphenated form toward the now-dominant solid spelling 'email' as the technology and term became commonplace, and 'website' followed a comparable shift from the earlier two-word 'web site.' It is not true that 'website' was solid from its very first appearance, since 'web site' was the earlier and, for a time, more common styling; and it's also not true that compound spelling is fixed forever once first recorded, since dictionaries regularly update entries as usage shifts, which is precisely why they track open, hyphenated, and closed forms over time rather than locking in a single permanent spelling. There has never been an international computing standard mandating the hyphen in 'e-mail,' and the unhyphenated form is now the one most major dictionaries list first.

Source: Merriam-Webster, 'Hyphen Rules in Compound Words' and its guide to compound-word spelling changes over time

Correct answer: .

A sentence is in the passive voice when its subject is the receiver of the action rather than the one performing it, built with a form of 'be' plus a past participle, often followed by a 'by' phrase naming who actually did the action; that's exactly the structure in the sentence where 'the plants' -- the thing being acted upon -- is the subject, with 'were watered' as the passive verb form and 'by the gardener' naming the true doer. The sentence about the gardener watering the plants is active, since its subject, 'the gardener,' is the one directly performing the watering. The sentence about the weather is also active and doesn't involve a past participle acting on a receiver at all; 'turned' there just describes a change of state, not something being done to the weather. The sentence about the team's practice contains the word 'been,' which can look passive at a glance, but 'has been practicing' is an active present-perfect-continuous verb form describing an ongoing action the team itself performs, not an action being done to the team, and the fact that 'was announced' appears later in that same sentence, describing the tournament rather than the team, doesn't change the voice of the main clause about the team.

Source: Purdue OWL, 'Active and Passive Voice'; BBC Bitesize KS3 English: Active and passive voice

Correct answer: .

'You're' is a contraction standing in for 'you are,' while 'your' is a possessive word showing that something belongs to 'you.' The correct sentence uses both correctly in the same breath: 'you're going,' meaning 'you are going,' and 'your umbrella,' meaning the umbrella belonging to you. The sentence claiming a person is 'your going to need' an umbrella swaps in the possessive where the contraction is needed, since it's really saying 'you are going.' The sentence about the umbrella getting soaked on the porch makes the opposite error, using the contraction 'you're' where a possessive is required, since it means 'your umbrella is getting soaked,' not 'you are umbrella.' The sentence praising whoever remembered a raincoat also uses the possessive where the contraction belongs, since 'your the only one' should be 'you're the only one,' meaning 'you are the only one.' Like 'its' and 'it's,' this pair is a classic source of errors precisely because the two words are pronounced identically despite spelling very different things.

Source: Oxford Dictionaries usage note on 'your' vs. 'you're'; BBC Bitesize KS3 English: commonly confused words