Question

Which of the following sentences has an INCORRECT subject-verb agreement?

Question 3 options:

Across the bay, fleets of old fishing boats was seen on the horizon.


Despite all the fuss about formal wedding dinners, I'm serving barbecue at mine.


Whenever you have time, the architect and his assistant would like to talk to you about the remodel.


Psychologists who came up with the idea of multitasking have lately been saying they were wrong.

Answer 1

The answer is:

Across the bay, fleets of old fishing boats was seen on the horizon.

Subject-verb agreement is the correspondence in number between the subject and the verb. As a result, if the subject is singular, the verb must be singular; and if the subject is plural, the verb must be plural as well.

In the example sentence, there is incorrect subject-verb agreement because the subject is plural (fleets of old fishing boats) and the auxiliary verb is singular (was). The correct version is the following:

Across the bay, fleets of old fishing boats were seen on the horizon.