broall wrote:
Neither Ramesh nor his friends is going to the ballet tonight, but one or two of them is planning on going tomorrow.
A. Neither Ramesh nor his friends is going to the ballet tonight, but one or two of them is planning on going tomorrow.
B. Neither his friends nor Ramesh is going to the ballet tonight, but one or two of them plans to go tomorrow.
C. Neither Ramesh nor his friends are going to the ballet tonight, but one or two of them are planning on going tomorrow.
D. Ramesh and his friends are not going to the ballet tonight, but one or two of them is planning to go tomorrow.
E. Ramesh, with several of his friends, is not going to the ballet tonight, and one or two them are planning on going tomorrow.
VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL EXPLANATION:
With so much underlined, it is essential that you locate several decision points that allow you to quickly eliminate clearly incorrect answer choices. In this problem, you should notice the difference between “are” and “is” in the first clause of the answer choices, and the difference between “is planning”, “are planning”, and “plans” in the second clause. Subject-verb agreement is almost always an easy error type to assess so that is a good place to start. However, here the rule is fairly tricky (but something you must have as a core competency for the exam)!
When using “or”, “either/or”, or “neither/nor,” the rule is to agree with whichever noun is closest to the noun; this is commonly called agreement by location. Starting with the first portion of each answer choice, that part is correct in 4 of the 5 choices so it doesn’t help that much. In (A), (B), and (C) you have the “neither/nor” construction and in (C) the plural noun “friends” is paired correctly with the plural verb “are”. In (B) the singular noun “Ramesh” is correctly paired with the singular verb “is”. However, in (A) the plural “his friends” is paired incorrectly with the singular “is” so you can eliminate (A) definitively. In (D) you have the plural compound subject “Ramesh and his friends” correctly paired with the plural verb “are” and in (E) the singular “Ramesh” is correctly paired with the singular verb “is”. Since all but (A) are correct, you must move on to the other subject-verb agreement decision point referenced above.
For this difference, all of them are incorrect but (C) and (E). In (A), (B) and (D), you have “one or two of them” before the verb, so you must agree with “two of them” as it is after “or” and closest to the verb. “Two” is plural so you cannot use the singular verbs “is planning” or “plans” with that subject. In (C) and (E) you have proper subject-verb agreement, so you must look for other differences to leverage. For (E) the change in the beginning of the sentence is nonsensical: you can’t “with several people” “not go to the ballet”! Furthermore, the conjunction “and” is strange as you are juxtaposing that some are not going tonight BUT some are tomorrow. The correct answer is (C).