Manhattan Book Subject Verb Agreement Doubt

[goelmohit2002]

Hi All,

Manhattan book on page#27 of Chapter 2 i.e. subject verb agreement gives the following problem#15:

"A majority of railway commuters reads or listens to music while traveling"

Manhattan says that this is correct.

But should not this be "read or listen" as we can replace "A majority" with SEVERAL here?

"A majority of railway commuters read or listen to music while traveling"

Moreover even if we replace the majority with "many" then as per SANAM rules of Manhattan the verb should be governed by the object in "of" construction. Here the object is "commuters"(which is plural) and not "commuter".

Please tell what I am missing here ?

Regards
Mohit

[dgr8onerip]

even i had the same doubt..
but on reading the theory written in the book,i think that in this sentence the word majority is the main subject
Also somewhere in the book i had read that the the part of the sentence after 'of' usually induces error in the subject verb relationship

So if u remove 'of the commuters' then it will be read as A majority reads and listens

hence the above sentence has no error

[goelmohit2002]

Thanks dgr8onerip.

But as per the example given in Manhattan while explaining Majority concept, it gives the following example:

"The majority of the students in this class ARE hard Workers"

Because of workers it looks fine to add ARE even if we remove "of the students"

But lets assume the sentence would have been like:

"The majority of the students in this class IS/ARE going to picnic"

What would be correct here ? if we remove "of the students", then "IS" looks fine. But if we go by SANAM rules, then "ARE" looks fine.

So which one should we choose ?

Thanks
Mohit

[scoobydooby]

refer to the following link...your very questions are dealt with:)

https://www.manhattangmat.net.in/forums/post21596.html

[goelmohit2002]

refer to the following link...your very questions are dealt with:)

https://www.manhattangmat.net.in/forums/post21596.html

Hi scoobydooby,

Thanks for redirecting to the nice post. In summary, the post also say to follow the SANAM rules of Manhattan SC guide and say that the correct sentence is "read or listen"

"A majority of railway commuters read or listen to music while traveling."

But the Manhattan SC guide says the opposite. It says "reads or listens" to be correct.

"A majority of railway commuters reads or listens to music while traveling"

We are back to square one. Back to where we started . Experts please tell which is the correct one for the above sentence.

a) "read or listen" OR
b) "reads or listens".

Thanks
Mohit

[Stacey Koprince]

This is a very tough rule. Context is key here.

The below applies to: majority, minority, and plurality.

If the intent is to indicate the many individuals making up the totality, use plural.

If the intent is to indicate the totality itself, use singular.

The sentence about the railway commuters was removed from the latest edition of the SC Guide (that is, it was in the 2nd edition but was cut when we wrote the 3rd edition). The writer's intent was to use "majority" to indicate totality there, but the sentence was poorly constructed - we couldn't actually tell that this was the intent. So, basically, don't study from that sentence - it wasn't a good example.

If the sentence does not indicate in some obvious way whether the target is the many individuals or the totality, then look to see whether there is an "of" prepositional phrase after the word (majority, minority, or plurality). If there is such a prepositional phrase, follow the SANAM rules: use the noun in the prepositional phrase to indicate whether the sentence should be singular or plural. (And if we followed this with the example from the old edition of the book, we would have had to use plural and the book would've been wrong!)

If there is NOT such a prepositional phrase, then you have to go back to whether the intention is to indicate many individuals or the totality - in this circumstance, it's usually the totality, so the correct answer is usually singular.

[goelmohit2002]

Thanks Stacey for the awesome post. Clears all the doubts on this subject.

So we can ignore the sentence in the Manhattan Guide and as Manhatan guide suggests place our bet on singular whenever in doubt.

Thanks
Mohit

[Stacey Koprince]

Exactly!