Subject Verb Agreement
Since your childhood you are familiar about dots matching in your activity book. Do you recall it? Yes, it may be the collection of few or several dots.So,in subject verb agreement.
Sometimes, to find the accuracy of a sentence, you have to link the dots between sentences, even if those parts are far from each other. So you would be amazed that what would be the dots in a sentence! These are the parts of a sentence:
The subject of a sentence is what for which sentence is written. A verb is a word that expresses an action.
So as we talked about “connect the dots analogy” is in fact that the subject and verb in a sentence have to agree in number means singular subject leads towards singular verb while plural subject leads towards plural verb. Let’s proceed further to get grip on content.
Simple Sentences and Compound Subjects
It's easy to make subjects and verbs agree in simple sentences.
For instance,
'My train arrives in a half hour,'
Here the subject, 'train,' is singular, as well as the verb, “arrives,' is singular.so we have agreement.
In this example, both the subject, 'parents,' and the verb, 'ask,' is plural.
'My parents ask me to study,'
When a add ‘s’ or ‘es’ with noun to make it plural as orange becomes oranges. Here the verb uses inversely.
For example, we would say,
'This orange provides good taste,' or 'these oranges provide good taste.'
Some sentences poses compound subjects. These are subjects that consist of more than one word. Compound subjects are linked by 'and' or 'or.' If a compound subject has parts joined by 'and' would need to be matched with a plural verb. For example
'My pen and my book are lost.'
Here compound subject 'My pen and my book’ is exactly matched with the plural verb 'are' here.
While in case of 'or,' determine whether component parts of the compound subject are singular or plural. If both parts of are singular, then a singular verb will be used.
For example,
'Either Mr. John or Mr. Joe is in principal of the school.'
In by plural case, a plural verb will be used. i.e
'I think that either snake or scorpion are the dangerous insects.'
In compound sentence with 'or' one part can be plural and the other part can be singular, for example
'Either Captain Irvin or the soldiers on duty tonight.'
The first part of our compound subject, 'Captain Irvin,' is singular, while the second part, 'soldiers,' is plural.
Let’s fill the blank by identifying the compound subject closer to the verb. In this case, it's the plural part of our compound subject - 'Soldiers.' So,the blank would take, ‘are’.
'Either Captain Irvin or the soldiers are on duty tonight.' Or vice versa,
“Either the soldiers or Captain Irvin or is on duty tonight.'