The Panda Says No Trivia Quiz

Answer: Remove the comma after the word 'Eats'.

As the anecdote to which she refers makes clear, the final sentence of this description implies that the panda can be expected to eat, then shoot something, then leave. Removing the comma leaves a description of its diet, which consists primarily of bamboo shoots and leaves.

Answer: book's for sale

The 'greengrocer's apostrophe' refers to an apostrophe that is incorrectly used when making a simple plural of a word by adding an 's'. The plural of book is books. I assume, of course, that the bookseller stocks more than one book.
Potato becomes plural by adding 'es', so this is not a 'greengrocer's apostrophe'.
If there is only a single pupil using the pupil's entrance, then that sign may be correctly punctuated. It is more likely that it should read 'pupils' entrance'. This is not a 'greengrocer's apostrophe', just an incorrect placement of the apostrophe.
According to Truss, the apostrophe for writing the plural of an abbreviation such as DVD used to be considered necessary, and is still considered acceptable, albeit unnecessary. As it is acceptable, it is not a 'greengrocer's apostrophe'.

Answer: either Keats' poems or Keats's poems

According to Truss, various authorities take strong and conflicting views on the issue of showing possession for names ending in 's', but both Keats' poems and Keats's poems are acceptable; she considers it a matter of style and preference, not a matter of correctness. From her research, she reports that the only consistent point she found was that almost everyone used Keats as their example, no matter which way they chose to show that he was the author of his poems.

Answer: Its too late for the dog to have it's dinner.

Truss states 'The Law of Conservation of Apostrophes' as follows: "for every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its." The other sentences all have possessive pronouns and contractions reversed, but do not involve the simple addition or removal of an apostrophe in the process.

Answer: There were cats, dogs, and other pets in the show.

'The Oxford comma' is a comma placed before the word 'and' at the end of a list. I was trained to use it when growing up in the United States, and told that it was absolutely incorrect when I started working as a teacher in Australia. Truss considers it a matter of taste, and sometimes useful to maintain clarity.

The sentence 'There were cats, both long-hair and short-hair, dogs, of many species, and other pets in the show' does not technically contain an Oxford comma, as the final comma is actually terminating a subordinate clause.

But it is an ugly sentence!

Answer: The boys wanted to stay up until midnight, but they grew tired and fell asleep.

The other sentences would be correct with a semicolon or full stop instead of the (first) comma. While Truss states that the splice comma (connecting two independent sentences, as when Jim is waking in a strange bed) is incorrect usage, she does concede that it can be used effectively by skilled writers for a stylistic effect. Likewise, e e cummings has a specific reason for his refusal to use upper case letters.

The rest of us should follow the rules.

Answer: colon and semicolon

According to Lynne Truss, "Assuming a sentence rises into the air with an initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP for hours if necessary ... but the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes - that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity - well, they are the colons and semicolons." Careful use of these punctuation marks allows the construction of complex sentences with the relationship between the various clauses precisely shown. Hyphens (-) join two words together to make a semi-compound word (see what I mean?); brackets (as used throughout this sentence) are used to separate an insertion from the surrounding text; ellipsis (...) is used to show that there are words missing from the text in a quoted passage or to allow a sentence to fade out gracefully without completion.

Answer: all of these

Starting a list is a use with which most people would be familiar. Truss refers to George Bernard Shaw's explanation of the correct use of punctuation in listing appositional statements (where the second statement clarifies or expands on the first) and oppositional statements (where the second statement contradicts the first). Colons can also be used to separate book and film sub-titles from the main titles, to start off long quotations, and (in play and movie scripts) to separate the character from the dialogue.

Answer: It is the most useful terminating punctuation mark.

She also describes the exclamation mark as "the big attention-deficit brother [of the punctuation family] who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly." It is a high-energy bit of punctuation, one which it is easy to overuse. (I personally have to force myself to edit all my emails before sending them, because the overabundance of exclamation marks makes it look as if I am shouting!)

Answer: They are not proper punctuation marks.

While acknowledging (and, indeed, celebrating) the fact that the use of punctuation has always been in a state of continuing evolution, Truss bemoans the laziness involved in the use of emoticons (along with an abundance of UPPER CASE LETTERS and exclamation marks!) in email and sms messages, and the implied lack of knowledge and respect for the traditional use of punctuation marks. :-(