Subject-Verb Agreement
How a verb agrees with its real subject in number and person, and the recurring traps banks test: intervening phrases, indefinite pronouns, compound subjects, collective nouns and quantity expressions.
What you will be able to do
- Identify the true subject of a sentence and ignore words that merely sit between it and the verb.
- Apply the standard rules for indefinite pronouns and for subjects joined by 'and', 'or' and 'nor'.
- Decide when a collective noun or a quantity takes a singular verb and when it takes a plural one.
- Spot a subject-verb error quickly in an error-detection or sentence-improvement question.
What is inside this lesson
- 1What agreement means
- 2Find the real subject
- 3The 'one of the ...' trap
- 4Indefinite pronouns
- 5Subjects joined by 'and', 'or', 'nor'
- 6Collective nouns and quantities
- 7Worked example: spotting the error
- 8Common mistakes
- 9Quick revision
- 10Practice
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What agreement means
A verb must agree with its subject in number and person. A singular subject takes a singular verb, and a plural subject takes a plural verb: "The report is ready" but "The reports are ready".
In the present tense the difference usually shows up as an -s on the third-person singular verb: "she writes", "the officer signs", against "they write", "the officers sign". With the verb "to be" it shows up as is/are and was/were.
Bank exams rarely ask about a plain subject next to its verb. They separate the two with extra words, or they use a subject whose number is not obvious, and then ask you to find the mistake. The rest of this topic is those cases.
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