Sentence Correction

A majority of the voters want/wants to unseat the incumbent.

Can you please explain if want or wants is correct?

It should be Want here. Here is what MGMAT says:

The words majority, minority, and plurality are either singular or plural, depending on their
context. If you want to indicate the many individual parts of the totality, use a plural verb.
If you want to indicate the totality itself then use a singular verb form.


Here we want to indicate majority of voters not all the voters.

gmatrant wrote:A majority of the voters want/wants to unseat the incumbent.

Can you please explain if want or wants is correct?

Shekhar,

I agree with your answer, but the confusion comes from the answer in Kaplan GMAT Premier 2010 Edition (page 100), it says that "as a general rule, the number of the verb depends on the sense of the sentence. Because unseating a politician is an action taken by the voters as a group, majority acts as a singular collective noun: "The majority wants to unseat."

I noticed that in MGMAT Sentence Correction, we are taught to treat quantity phrases in the same way as SANAM (some, any, none, all, many) pronouns: the noun in the Of-prepositional phrase will indicate whether the verb is singular or plural.

In this case in A majority of the voters, voters is plural, so we should use WANT.

Can someone kindly verify which one is right?

When majority is followed by a prepositional phrase beginning with 'of' and something that is countable - like "the majority of people/students/us," etc. - we invariably use a plural verb with it. When it stands by itself, it is often singular, as in "The majority has spoken," but not always, as when the countable subjects are clearly implied, as in "The voters of Hampden County have registered, and the majority have registered Democrat."

- This is an excerpt from one of the websites when I was trying to research on this.

Thanks
HK.

The following are three examples which have i seen. The first two I am able to interpret why the particular verb is different but the third one confuses me between 1 and 3

1. The majority of students ARE
2. The student majority IS
3. A majority of railway commuters READS books.

Is the difference in article also doing the trick?
Can anyone help me with this..

want