Question

The cricketer, whose record is exemplary, bagged an eight-year endorsement contract with a sportswear giant.

• A. who’s record is exemplary, bagged eight years’ endorsement contract
• B. who’s record is exemplary, bagged eight year’s endorsement contract
• C. whose record is exemplary, bagged an eight-years endorsement contract
• D. no correction required

Answer 1

The correct option is D no correction required

There are two things to pick up on here- the difference between whose and who’s, and the rules to be followed when using compound adjectives.

Who’s is a contraction of ‘who is’ or ‘who has’. You would use it to ask, for example, “Who’s the first?”.

Whose, on the other hand, is the possessive form of ‘who’ and functions as an adjective or pronoun. For example, “Whose book is this?”

The easiest way to identify which word is right in the given context is to substitute ‘who is/has’ instead of who’s in the sentence and see if it makes sense. If it does, who’s is the word you are looking for.

In the sentence given, ‘whose’ is the correct word to use. It functions as a pronoun for ‘the cricketer’.

Now, in the sentence given ‘eight-year’ is a compound adjective used to describe the noun ‘contract’. The hyphen between the two words is used to link them together and show that it is one adjective.

When compound adjectives include a number + a time period, the word referring to the time period is always in singular form and is joined to the number with a hyphen.

So, the given sentence does not contain any errors.