Question

How do you correct the subject-verb disagreement in the following sentence? The children play hide and seek.

Answer 1

Hint: A subject- verb agreement states that a subject and a verb must agree with each other in numbers. If a subject is singular, the verb to be followed should also be singular and if the subject is plural, the verb to be followed should also be plural. Anything that doesn’t abide by this, is called the subject-verb disagreement. We will apply the same rule here to fetch the correct answer.

Complete answer:
Let us discuss how we can correct the given sentence in terms of subject-verb agreement. The given sentence to us is “The children play hide and seek”. Here the subject is “children”. Children is the plural noun, child is the singular noun.

Now, let us learn about the verb. The given verb is “plays” which is a singular form. The plural form of the verb to be used here will be “play”. The subject-verb disagreement is significant in the given sentence as the subject used is in plural form and the verb used is in the singular form. To correct that we either change both the subject and the verb in singular form or both of them in plural form.

Therefore, the correct sentence will be:
“The children play hide and seek”. Or “The child plays hide and seek”.

Note: In a sentence, the singular or plural form of the verb depends upon the subject of the sentence, as explained in the above stated hint. Let us have a closer look at such examples:
The list of the guests are kept on the desk. (Incorrect).
The list of the guests is kept on the desk. (Correct).