Question

Choose the sentence where the underlined word is used appropriately.

• A. Who's car are you planning to borrow?
• B. Whose planning to have a birthday party?
• C. He is the person who you met at the junction.
• D. Does he know whom to call about the hotel reservations?

Hint:

Expand who's to "who is," and check if the pronoun is doing a subject job or an object job in the sentence.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is D

A clean way through this question is to expand each underlined word to what it stands for or ask what job it does in the sentence, one option at a time.

1. Who's car are you planning to borrow?: "who's" always expands to "who is" or "who has." Put that in: "who is car are you planning to borrow" makes no sense. The sentence needs the possessive "whose," so this use is wrong.
2. Whose planning to have a birthday party?: try expanding the intended meaning, "who is planning to have a birthday party." That calls for "who's" (who is), not "whose," so this use is also wrong.
3. He is the person who you met at the junction.: strip the sentence down, "you met [him]," so the person is on the receiving end of "met," which makes it an object. Objects take "whom," so plain "who" is wrong here.
4. Does he know whom to call about the hotel reservations?: strip this down too, "call [him]," so the person is again the object, this time of "to call." An object correctly takes "whom," and that is what the sentence uses.

Only the last sentence pairs its underlined word with the job that word is actually doing in the sentence.

Let's summarize:

• who's = who is/who has (a contraction, never possessive)
• whose = shows possession
• who = subject of a verb
• whom = object of a verb or preposition

So option 4 is the only correctly used sentence.