What both puzzles and intrigues many investigators is the differing

Why are we not selecting singular 'puzzle' and 'intrigue', which is in option D

Hi Ankit

The words "puzzle" and "intrigue" are used as verbs in this sentence (something is doing the puzzling and intriguing to the investigators). In this case, "puzzle" and "intrigue" are plural forms of the verbs.

We are indeed selecting the singular forms of the verbs in the correct answer option (A) as explained by Sajjad in the OE.

Hope this clarifies.
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Is the last verb "is" in the underlined portion referring to "Different tendencies"? Tendencies is plural. So I though we have to use "are", not "is". Which means the correct answer should be among the choices B, C, or E. Can someone please clear my doubt? Thanks.

While i do not have complete information on this Q, but as per the explanations given above, "what both A and B many investigators is" is a noun clause. Now a clause is a complete sentence with its own subject and verb. In this clause, the subject is "what" (presumably) and the verb for that is "is" after "many investigators". The part after "is" is the predicate - it is giving information about what is the puzzling and intrigue about.

EDIT -- I found a good article by mikemcgarry on noun (substantive clauses). https://magoosh.com/gmat/verbal/sentenc ... s%20as,etc.

CRUX
1. Begin with a relative pronoun
2. Mostly these will be singular (barring exceptions)
3. Exception is where the relative pronoun is understood to be plural or singular
4. Rare on GMAT, but if you want to take a guess, go for singular (most of the times)

Now if we apply the above logic, the options B, C and E can clearly be ruled out because "what A and B many investigators" is ONLY ONE thing i.e. "differing tendencies".

Now, I am only confused on the subject verb agreement within the noun clause. If "many investigators" is the subject within the clause, then, D should be right. IanStewart AndrewN. Help please!

I frankly find the OA and OE here baffling. Either I've been speaking English incorrectly for decades, or the OA here is just wrong. The OE's explanation might be a correct justification for saying "puzzles and intrigues", but it doesn't justify saying "is". That verb needs to agree in number with "tendencies".

When we use "what" in this relative way, we're really saying "The thing that", and it's correct to say "The thing that intrigues and puzzles investigators..." but the verb "to be" needs to agree with "tendencies", since the words on either side of "to be" can both be construed as subjects. The only grammatically correct answers here are C and E, between which C is preferable.

It seems to me if you believe the OE's justification for A here, you'd need to think these are correct as well:

"What leads me to believe the defendant is guilty is the witness statements that were read in court."
"What is we doing?"

and neither of those is correct (both would be correct if you replaced "is" with "are" though).

What is the source?
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I have no problem with the OA and chose (A) in less than 30 seconds. When a nominative clause (defined as a substantive clause here) acts as a subject in a statement, barring internal cues that point to a need for a subsequent plural verb agreement, it can be thought of as a singular entity, even if that same clause would follow a plural verb conjugation as a direct object. If we were to rewrite the original sentence and place the clause at the end, for instance, and strip it down to its barebones, we would get,

The differing tendencies are what both puzzle and intrigue many investigators.



If we are to think of the substantive clause what as the thing that, then we should be looking for a singular verb agreement in the main clause, since the thing... are violates basic subject-verb agreement, and regardless of whether "the words on either side of 'to be' can both be construed as subjects," the potential subject that comes first, in this case the entire what clause, should dictate agreement, not the second. I would add that the context of the substantive clause could also steer us into an interpretation that what is standing in for the things that, as in the following examples:

What always get me in that level are the zombies. (This could be said of a video game.)
What anger me are unruly mobs.

Do people talk like this? No. I myself would not likely say either in casual conversation. But if I were writing either sentence formally, I would keep the verb tense as written.


In the first sentence, if witness statements are seen as the body of evidence—i.e. the witness statements, collectively—that compels the speaker/writer to arrive at such a conclusion, then is works just fine; otherwise, if we are counting individual statements, I would expect to see, What lead me to believe...

The second sentence is a question, and questions often adopt inverted structures, so I will not comment on that one except to say that I agree: are is necessary.

I cannot find an official question that tests this exact split in the same manner as above, but on this side exercise, I am with the OA, with all due respect to IanStewart, whose views I regard quite highly.

- Andrew
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Thanks Andrew for the well-written explanation. As you pointed out, you would expect to see lead in the above example. In the same way, for this question, I was expecting to see "puzzle and intrigue" since the first What is referring to tendencies which is a plural form. Choice B correctly uses "puzzle and intrigue" and "are". Isn't B more suitable than A?

That high regard is reciprocal, but we don't agree about this question. I'll take one final try at explaining how I think this sentence should be parsed.

First, there's an unavoidable disagreement in number in the question; "what" is singular (until proven otherwise), while "tendencies" is plural. But they're also the subjects of different verbs. "What" is the subject of "puzzles and intrigues", while at least notionally, "tendencies" is the subject of "are". I suggested replacing "What" with "The thing that", but I was consciously choosing a simple word ("thing") for clarity, when a more correct choice would be one that could encompass either a singular or plural -- something like "The phenomenon that" is maybe better. So this sentence:

The tendencies of PBA are the phenomenon that puzzles investigators.

is a pared-down version of the original, where "tendencies" is the subject of "are", and "phenomenon" is the subject of "puzzles". Rearranging, we get

The phenomenon that puzzles investigators are the tendencies of PBA.

and using "What" in place of "The phenomenon that", we get

What puzzles investigators are the tendencies of PBA.

This may say more about my powers of imagination than it does about the English language, but I can't imagine a sentence that looks like the following would ever be exclusively correct:

... is the tendencies ...

since there is then a flagrant disagreement between verb and number. I'd presume anyone reading a sentence like that would be confused about how the verb functions, and what it goes with, since it cannot logically go with "the tendencies". Since the only real purpose of grammar "rules" i to ensure clarity and precision, any usage that engenders confusion about meaning is usually disfavoured, even if strict application of rules might suggest that usage is correct (synesis and the principle of proximity are two examples of linguistic principles that sometimes override strict application of grammar rules when we choose the best sentence construction).

So in your examples, I would, by the same reasoning, say "What gets me in that level are the zombies", and "What angers me are unruly mobs", and when the first verb is made plural, the language begins to sound to my ear like something from Elizabethan times.

We do agree though that this isn't something likely to ever show up on the GMAT. It's funny - I showed this sentence to a writer friend to get another opinion about correct verb tenses, and they said "I would never write a sentence like that", precisely because it confuses singular and plural things. So maybe the best answer is that it's just not a good sentence in the first place!
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Hello, Dvaishnav. Although I would agree that (B) is tenable, a substantive clause, as a subject, should be thought of as a singular entity until proven otherwise. Choice (A) does not create any expectation that plural agreement is needed within the what clause, so that portion of it cannot be thought of as incorrect.

- Andrew
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We may not agree, but I enjoy the dialogue, and I hope others benefit by reading it.


Your logic is flawless. At the same time, you have to be careful in calling attention to a snippet of a sentence and spinning such an argument from it. I could drum up any of a number of legitimate sentences that would apparently fit into a similar camp. Consider introductory prepositional phrases alone, a case in which we occasionally see an inverted sentence structure:

On the dashboard sit the M&Ms. → the dashboard sit (incorrect interpretation) v. sit the M&Ms (correct reading)

What to make of the following sentence?

When I was growing up, my favorite toy was Legos. → my favorite toy was v. was Legos

By extension, we could conceivably write,

When I was growing up, my favorite toy was the Legos handed down to me by my brother. → my favorite toy was v. was the Legos

Do the Lego sentences above need to be scrapped to fit a more adult frame? (When I was growing up, my favorite toys were Legos.) My favorite toy + [plural entity] seem to be at grammatical loggerheads. Not to say that I would argue against the correctness of the last Lego sentence, but at the same time, pluralizing toy diminishes the message, at least to me (unless we were to preface the main clause with all, even if that addition, in turn, might alter the meaning of the original sentence).


I completely agree—the language of my original zombie and mob sentences sounds antiquated, and I readily admitted that I would not speak that way. This is the kind of linguistic grey area I often delved into in graduate school, in which historical precedent seemed not to reflect current speech patterns but was nevertheless upheld by grammarians and reference texts. For the record, I tend to fall much more on the linguist side of such debates, since I see human language as an organic extension of ourselves, something that is always in flux (whether I, or any other individual, may like it). I also like to laugh at overly wrought language, such as the retort attributed to Sir Winston Churchill on learning of a grammatical correction someone made to one of his lines for a speech, a line that ended with a preposition:

This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.


For GMAT™ purposes, we can agree on this point. Thank you for your good-natured challenge.

Cheers,
Andrew
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Thanks AndrewN for the detailed explanations. Could you help me identify the subject within the substantive clause that leads to "puzzles & intrigues" rather than "puzzle & intrigue"? How do we determine the split b/w A and D?

Hello, ravigupta2912. To answer your first question, I would quote my colleague IanStewart above:


There may be disagreement on what, exactly, what can stand in for—a singular or a plural entity (e.g., thing v. things, or phenomenon v. phenomena)—but even if you want to make it plural, you would not then say, What [plural agreement] is, so (D) can safely be eliminated. Choice (B) is more consistent along the same line of thought, agreeing plural internal verb conjugations with a plural conjugation of to be in the main clause, as Dvaishnov pointed out earlier.

Take from this question what you will. It is probably not worth fussing over any more than has been done already—study GMAT™ questions to prepare for the GMAT™.

- Andrew
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As per rule, the substansive clause takes a singular verb , but as mentioned in the link shared by ravigupta2912 of mikemcgarry's take on substansive clause,there's an exception to this as follows :

"Here’s the exception. If the substantive clause begins with a relative pronoun —- who, whom, what, where, whoever, whomever, whatever, wherever — then whether the clause is singular or plural depends on whether the relative pronoun itself is understood as singular or plural.

10) What annoys me is all the noise during the movie.

11) What annoy me are all the people who talk during the movie.

In #10, the relative pronoun is understood as singular, and thus the entire substantive clause is construed as singular: that’s why both verbs (“annoys”, “is”) are singular. In #11, the relative pronoun is understood as plural, and thus the entire substantive clause is construed as plural: that’s why both verbs (“annoy”, “are”) are plural."

This changes the answer to using "is" .
Ian Please comment!

I haven't given any thought to whether that rule is correct, but if you apply it to the question in this thread, then it supports using "are", not "is", because in the original sentence, it's "differing tendencies" (plural) that goes with the relative pronoun. One poster earlier in this thread said that "differing tendencies" was "ONLY ONE thing", and I suppose if you thought that, you'd prefer the verb "is" here. But I don't see how it is possible to construe "tendencies" as a singular subject.

I don't know the source of the original question in this thread, but it's not an official question, so there's no reason to trust either the OA or the OE. I stand by what I said earlier: it's not possible that the "OA" of A is the correct answer.
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I'll reorganize this to be more direct:

The differing tendencies puzzle and intrigue

The differing tendencies puzzles and intrigues

First seems right, implying D. What am I missing?

If you continue to reorganize the sentence in that way, I think you'd arrive at this:

The differing tendencies are what puzzle and intrigue investigators.

which would argue for answer B rather than answer D. I could understand that justification for B, but to me, when I read the sentence, the word "what" stands for something singular. For example, I can imagine saying "What puzzles me? The differing tendencies of PBA," but not "What puzzle me? The differing tendencies of PBA." So C seems like the most natural English to me, but I could understand someone arguing for B.
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(A) What both puzzles and intrigues many investigators is
The thing that intergues is singular therefore 'is' the correct usage

(B) What both puzzle and intrigue many investigators are
puzzles and intergues is the right usage hence out

(C) What both puzzles and intrigues many investigators are
Similar reasoning as A hence out

(D) What both puzzle and intrigue many investigators is
Simikar reasoning as B

(E) What are both puzzles and intrigues for many investigators are[/quote]
the placement of are after both makes it akward and the meaning becomes distorted

Therefore IMO A

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