SAT® · Reading and Writing: Form, Structure, and Sense — Agreement
Finding the Real Subject
The test often separates a subject from its verb with phrases and clauses describing other nouns. Find the real subject by crossing out every modifier and asking who or what is actually doing the verb's action.
Sentences on the test love to put a tempting noun right before the verb, hoping you match the verb to that noun instead of the real subject. The trick works because reading left to right trains you to grab whatever noun shows up last before the verb. But English allows long strings of modifiers between a subject and its verb, and every one of those modifiers can carry its own noun, usually with a different number than the actual subject.
The fix is mechanical. Cross out every prepositional phrase, every clause starting with who, which, or that, and every participial phrase tacked onto the sentence. What survives is the bare subject and its verb, sitting right next to each other the way they are meant to. Once you have that skeleton, ask who or what is performing the action, not which noun is closest. That question forces you to find the head noun, the one word the whole subject phrase is actually about, rather than a noun buried inside a modifier.
This skill sits underneath every subject-verb agreement question that looks hard. Once you can isolate the head noun, matching it to a singular or plural verb becomes the easy part, and the same stripping technique carries over to pronoun-antecedent agreement, where you need to find the one noun a pronoun is actually replacing, ignoring every noun parked in between.
Key terms
- head noun
- The single noun that a subject phrase is actually about, the one the verb must agree with.
- modifier
- A word, phrase, or clause that describes another noun without itself being the subject.
- prepositional phrase
- A phrase starting with a word like of, by, or with that often hides a distracting noun near the verb.
- relative clause
- A clause starting with who, which, or that, which describes a noun but cannot supply the sentence's main verb.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do you strip a sentence to its bare subject by crossing out everything that merely modifies it?
- How it worksHow does asking who or what is performing the verb find the subject faster than reading left to right?
- Worked exampleWalk me through finding the subject of 'The collection of fossils donated by the trustees arrive Tuesday'.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the subject simply the first noun you meet in the sentence?
Check yourself
End of topic.