I was watching Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? on which we were asked to count the adjectives in the sentence “Spencer takes good care of his hairy dog.” I’ll hold the answer they gave until later.
Obviously “hairy” is an adjective describing “dog”. Also, it’s pretty clear that “good” describes “care”. I expect most of you are saying that that’s all the adjectives in the sentence. However, consider the word “his”. It tells us which dog Spencer is taking care of. That is one of the definitions of an adjective. I know many of you are shouting at me that “his” is a pronoun. This I am not contesting. But since when is a particular word limited to one function? Anyway, there is at least one source (see dictionary.com) which lists “his” as an adjective. Now, by the same logic, one might consider “the” and “a” as adjectives even though they are generally considered to be articles and so the argument could be made that “his” is really an article. On the flip side, one could argue that articles are really adjectives.
On the show, they said the answer is two. I contend the answer is three since “his” is serving as an adjective in the sentence. And yes, I would accept the contention that the articles are also adjectival in nature if that is a necessary consequence of that assertion.
Perhaps I’ll be back with more musing about grammar in the future. Meanwhile, let me end with, “Flames away!”
A bit late to be responding, but just saw the episode. I agree completely. "His" is being used as a possessive adjective.
Later on the episode, they also claim 1000 watts are in a kilowatt hour, which is also completely incorrect. Watts are a rate of using power (like miles per hour). Kilowatt hour is a measurement of used power (like miles). They’re not comparable.
Late replies are cool.
Upon reflection, I think maybe they are weren’t counting "good" as an adjective but rather as part of the verb. That is, they were considering the verb to be "take care" and then defining "good" as an adverb or they were taking "take good care" all together as the verb. Neither of those options is valid in my opinion as "take" takes a direct object, in this case "care", and we all know that objects are nouns (or equivalent). After all, it doesn’t matter what it means to take care, only that take is a verb and care is an object.
I also remember thinking kilowatthours are a measure of energy while watts are a measure of the rate of usage. For enquiring minds, 1 kWh is equivalent to 3.6 MJ (megajoules). (1 kW = 1000 W = 1 kJ/s; 1 hour = 3600 seconds; 1 kJ/s * 3600 s = 3600 kJ). I suppose if you squint at it in the right way and take a few liberties with just what "in" means in context, you just might arrive at the question and answer they used, but I don’t see quite how anyone with any grounding in science at all would have allowed that through.