ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by 'fibrous husk.'

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A term which...has kind of ruined our appetite for coconut.

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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coconut, and all drupes, have

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And here are the potential answers:

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The first thing to think about here is subject-verb agreement.

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Believe us, when the subject and verb don't agree, the rest of the sentence suffers.

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And then nobody's happy.

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Here's the basic principle: when a subject is singular, the verb should be singular,

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and when the subject is plural, the verb should be plural.

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For example, we wouldn't say, "The monkey throw the coconut at the tourists," because

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in this case "monkey" is singular and "throw" is plural.

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Instead, we'd make the subject and verb match by rendering them both singular: "The

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monkey throws the coconut at the tourists."

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Or, we could also make them both plural: "The monkeys throw coconuts at the tourists."

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Simple, right? Sure, but this question has another trick up its sleeve...

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We also notice that "and all drupes" is separated by commas, signaling that it's

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non-essential information to the rest of the sentence.

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As such, we can ignore it when considering important questions like subject-verb agreement.

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The subject of this sentence is the singular word "coconut," not the plural word "drupes."

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Therefore, we know we need a singular verb to match.

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Since choices (A), (C), and (D) all use the plural verb "have," we can knock them

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out at the same time.

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This leaves us with choice (B), the correct answer.

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Yeah, it sounds weird because the plural noun "drupes" appears right before the singular verb "has."

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However, the real subject of "has" is "coconut," which is singular. So... "has" is indeed the

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correct verb here.

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We think we'll celebrate by putting the lime in the coconut...

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