when to use apostrophes or when to use a preposition

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Hi,

I am having a lot of difficulty with this issue.

I know that it is correct to use an apostrophe for phrases such as "john's hat" and "Kim's friends" instead of "the hat of John" or "the friends of kim", and it's incorrect to use an apostrophe for other things (i.e. "the kingdom of Denmark" should not be "Denmark's kingdom"), but I am having trouble figuring out when it is correct to use one rule or the other for many other scenarios, and I have frequently been surprised to find that I am usually picking the wrong answer as a result of trying to use this rule that I don't understand.

For example, it really surprised me to find out the more correct answer on an OG problem(#120) was "human beings' burning of fossil fuels", and not "fossil fuels burned by human beings"

Is there a clear way of knowing how to choose the correct answer with these kinds of issues in the future, or an easy rule I can draw upon when faced with these questions. They seem to always get the best of me.

Thanks for any help!
Source: — Sentence Correction |

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by Patrick_GMATFix » Fri Aug 17, 2012 4:22 pm
msbelasco,

In that question, answer E is incorrect not because "fossil fuels burned by human beings" is grammatically wrong but because it distorts the meaning.

Think of the story the author is trying to tell with that sentence: the underlined modifier tries to say that global warming is a phenomenon caused not by the fossil fuels themselves (after all fossil fuels have existed for millions of years), but by the burning of these fuels.

Keeping that in mind, look at C vs E again. Below are simplified versions

C) ...global warming, a phenomenon caused by the burning of fuels...
E) ...global warming, a phenomenon caused by fossil fuels burned...

E > C

-Patrick
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