Take the Subject-Verb Agreement, Part 2 Quiz!
I had a lot of positive feedback on the quiz I recently added to the article “Subject-Verb Agreement, Part 1,” so I did one for Part 2 as well. If you’d like, you may review the lesson here before giving it a try.
If you do decide to test your knowledge of slightly more advanced subject-verb agreement principles, be sure to tell us how you did in the comment section below!
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Share you scores or other comments in the reply section below!
This quiz was awesome! I scored 100 % thanks to Rod and Staff Publishers Inc. By the way I highly reccommend Rod and Staff’s Building Christian English Series. They explain grammar very clearly.
(There is supposed do be a comma after the “By the way,”)
Don’t worry, Nut, I don’t correct comments. We overlook missing commas around here. 🙂
Thanks for the grammar book recommendation. I’ve heard good things about Rod & Staff.
My confusion is with the Has/Have any of the detectives – any is singular but detectives is plural right? So “has” should go with “any” since any is the subject right? Or is it that “any” is renaming “detectives”? But that doesn’t seem right. Now I don’t even know what to ask!
Ah. Actually, “any” is one of those troublesome pronouns that can be either singular or plural. I explain it more fully in the article here: http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2012/11/subject-verb-agreement-part-2/
Basically, if “any” refers to a singular or non-count noun (e.g., any of the money, any of the moon, any of the wine, etc) it is singular. If it refers to a plural noun (e.g., any of the flowers, any of the decisions, any of the detectives, etc.) it is plural and takes a plural verb.
This stuff is tricky!
I got 93%. My favorite sentence was the one about the bikers xD
Good job, Kela. That’s my favorite sentence too.
100% — thanks to Latin, mostly. 😀
Macte virtute! Factum optime!
Hey Brian – love your quizzes! Thanks for posting them. I got the one about the Gardners and Mrs Somebody on the porch wrong… So – Gardners is plural and Mrs Somebody is singular – do you choose the verb based on the noun closest to the verb? I chose plural because of the Gardners – but got slapped back! Thanks for the guidance – John
That’s correct, John. When “or” links the subjects in a compound subject, the verb agrees with the subject part that is closest to the verb.
I explain with examples in the article:
http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2012/11/subject-verb-agreement-part-2/
I also got that question wrong.
That’s the one I got wrong, too. You learn something every day.
Not bad, 87%. You were right, though. It was harder 🙂 .
Wait till you see the NEXT one! Mwaa-ha-ha!
Oh boy 🙂
I scored 80%. But I don’t understand why the first one is wrong.
“The football players, enthusiastic about their chances to finally upend their long-time rivals, the Cougars, who are currently top-ranked in the state, _______ harder than ever.”
The answer seems to indicate that the subject must be singular. But I can barely even find any singular nouns in the sentence. If it is singular, then the subject would have to be “state” and that doesn’t make any sense. It seems to me that the subject should be “players” so the verb should agree with it. I was marked wrong, however, for putting it that way.
Am I missing something on that one? Or could the “answer key” possibly have that one off?
Oh, and I did take this one without reviewing. 🙂
Sorry about that, Amber. You were literally the first one to take the quiz, and you uncovered an error. I made a mistake when setting up the quiz and marked the wrong correct answer for the first question. You did, in fact, get that one right.
I’m glad you took the time to comment, otherwise I’d have confused a lot of people with that one!
YAY! So that means I scored 87%. Like many of the others, the “Gardners or Mrs. W—–” question caught me. I don’t remember that rule, but I’ll have to now. I can’t wait for the next quiz.