Introduction
Subject-verb agreement questions appear under the Standard English Conventions domain, which accounts for roughly 26% of operational Reading and Writing questions. On every agreement question, the passage contains a blank or an underlined verb, and your job is to pick the form — singular or plural — that matches the verb's true grammatical subject. The challenge is that the true subject is often disguised: buried behind prepositional phrases, flipped to the wrong side of the verb, or expressed by a collective noun or indefinite pronoun that students habitually miscategorize.
Core Concept
A finite verb must agree in number (singular or plural) with its grammatical subject — not with whatever noun happens to be nearest to the verb. The SAT exploits three main traps to hide the true subject:
- Interrupting phrases — prepositional phrases ("of the students"), relative clauses ("who work in labs"), or appositive phrases placed between the subject and the verb.
- Inverted word order — the verb precedes the subject, most commonly in sentences beginning with There is/are or Here is/are, or in stylistic inversions.
- Collective and indefinite subjects — nouns that look plural but take singular verbs (or vice versa), requiring case-by-case knowledge.
The fix is always the same: strip out everything between the subject and verb, identify the true subject, determine its number, and match the verb.
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