Hey, everyone, welcome back to another English grammar lesson. Today we’re going to be finishing
our study on subject-verb agreement.
Okay, so—obviously—if you haven’t seen our
last two videos on this stuff, you’re going to want to go back and check those out before
get into this one because it’s going to get—well—pretty tricky… All right, so,
the first really weird type of sentence we’re going to look at has to do with nouns that
seem like they would be plural but are actually singular. And the most common example I can
think of for this would be school subjects: "Mathematics is very difficult" or “Mathematics
are very difficult”? Okay, well, “mathematics” is a plural noun, right? “Mathematics”—with
an "s." But it's just one subject. It's just one thing. So, you would actually say, in
this sentence, that "Mathematics is very difficult"—because the one subject of math is hard. The same
thing is true for, say—I don’t know—economics. "Economics is my favorite subject." Yes, I
know, “economics” is plural—“economics,” with an “s.” But it’s just one subject—one
thing. So, "Economics is my favorite subject." Mathematics, economics, physics—it is all
the same; these are all one subject, so you've got to pick the singular verbs to match up
with them. The same thing is true for movie or book titles that might be plural. “The
Goonies is a great movie.” Yes, I know, the word “Goonies” is plural (we’ve
been over this), but the movie itself is just one thing—one piece of work—so we would
say “The Goonies is...” The same thing is also true for sums of money. “Ten dollars
is more than I have.” “Dollars…” okay, yeah, plural again—but ten dollars is a
single amount—a single sum, a single total—of money. So, we would say “Ten dollars is…”
And finally, we have "none." “None” is a really weird word because it's almost always
followed by a prepositional phrase: "none of the people," "none of the books," "none
of the computers"… And, unfortunately, when it comes to the word "none," you actually
do need to take a look at the prepositional phrase. You need to identify what the main
noun is in that phrase, and that's going to tell you what your verb should be. So, like
this: "None of the pizza tastes good" or “None of the pizza taste good”? Okay, so, normally
you’d forget all about that prepositional phrase, right? "Of the pizza"? But with the
word "none," we actually do have to look at the prepositional phrase because that's where
we're going to find our subject. And in this sentence, that subject is “pizza.” And
pizza “tastes”—with an “s”—so we would say "None of the pizza tastes good."
Next one: "None of the men wants to volunteer" or “None of the men want to volunteer”?
Again, normally, you would just forget about the prepositional phrase here; you'd just
kind of get rid of it. But not with the word “none.” So, when we look at this phrase,
we find our subject to be “men,” and men want, so we would say "None of the men want
to volunteer.” Okay, so, remember, with things like school subjects, titles, sums
of money, and just big “collectives” of stuff in general, you usually want to pick
singular verbs. And when you use the word “none,” you actually need to look at the
prepositional phrase and base your verb on the main noun in that phrase. Whew… Yikes…
That was a thing... Anyway, whether you came here for a refresher or are just now learning
this stuff for the first time, I hope this video helped. Be sure to check out the free
practice down in the description, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks.