What is wrong with year's and year here?

Question

I wrote this sentence:

In India, many aspirants take a year break to crack competitive exams so that they can study in a premier institute.

My teacher corrected it to:

In India, many aspirants take a year's break to crack competitive exams so that they can study in a premier institute.

Why do we need year's over there? I understand possessive noun but I am a bit confused here. Why year's is required here? When I am writing a year break, it means 1 year break. What does a year's break mean here? Also, why is it required here?

Answer 1

The apostrophe-s is used to to indicate the genitive, which can be used to indicated possession, quantity or relationship. Of does a similar job, but people often show strong preferences for one form or the other in a particular situation.

In this case, a year is quantity: we are saying that they are taking a year of break. The preferred genitive in this case is a year's break.

Note that, when the noun we attach the apostrophe-s to is plural, the order of the apostrophe and the s is reversed:

John has ten years' experience

some people don't like this form, an prefer to write it as

John has ten years of experience.