Language Quiz

Here's the new quiz - and always remember, maybe nothing is wrong!

From an entry in Wikipedia:

The Velikovsky/Ackerman catastrophism also reveals many facts still unknown in uniformitarian (academic) circles, concerning the other planets.

Remember: I'm looking for something grammatically wrong, not factually!

Here's the previous quiz:

From an interoffice memo:

The team is developing a list of skills and knowledge's needed by the analyst of the future.

First things first: "team" is singular in American and plural in British. Whether "team is" is right or wrong depends on where you are.

The problem here is the plural form knowledge's.

Apostrophes are a relatively new thing in English. You can't hear them, and their use took a long time to be standardized. Lots of people have problems with them. Many people want to do what this one did: use an apostrophe after a vowel. But that's not what determines it.

The apostrophe is used to mark either missing letters (in contractions like can't or we'll or he's (can not, we will, he is)) - or to show the possessive of nouns (John's, dog's, dogs', women's) but not pronouns (which is why it's not it's meaning "belonging to it").

So, knowledge's means "belonging to knowledge". The plural of knowledge is just knowledges. (The final E gets pronounced now, but it doesn't call for an apostrophe.)

The use of a plural of "knowledge", by the way, is jargony. Abstract nouns generally don't have plurals; "knowledge" to mean "item/piece of knowledge; skill; ability" is limited in its use. Whether you want to do it will depend on your topic and your audience.

Remember, previous quizzes (32 so far) can be found here.