SC: "the doctors growing success..."

Question

Hello,

I recently did this SC problem on magoosh:

The doctors' growing success in treating the Acpias Virus and the recently developed vaccine suggest that this disease might not be as virulent as the press initially reported.

It got me thinking, what if the sentence was constructed like this:

The doctors' growing success in treating the Acpias Virus and  in treating the flu  suggest that this disease might not be as virulent as the press initially reported.

Would the subject now be singular, since both prepositional phrases modify success? Thus the verb would be  suggests .

OR would they be considered separate and require the plural verb  suggest ?

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

The plural of success is successes, of course. So I am going with the idea that since in your example the doctors' success is not broken down into multiple successes, the subject is singular and the verb should be  suggests .

I guess one could argue that in your example  success  should be  successes , at least depending on the meaning to be conveyed.

Here are some related examples.

The doctors' growing success in treating the Acpias virus and the flu suggests that this disease might not be as virulent as the press initially reported.

The doctor has experienced great success in treating the Acpias virus, the flu and other related illnesses.

Porkbun123 · Answer

Ah ok, that definitely clarifies things.

The doctors' growing success in treating the Acpias virus and the flu suggests that blah blah blah.

Here, the preposition is "acpias virus and the flu." This is an example of parallelism within a prepositional phrase->Success is singular->Need suggests

The doctors' growing successes in treating the Acpias Virus and  in treating the flu  suggest that blah blah blah.

Here, there are two successes ->need suggest.

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear Porkbun123 I'm happy to help. :-)

First of all, the way you have phrased the sentence is a little wordy. The subject is " success ," a singular noun. It doesn't matter what modifies the singular noun---how many prepositions, what plural nouns in noun-modifying phrases, etc.--- a singular noun ALWAYS takes a singular verb . I will say, in your version there's a logical pronoun error: you mention two diseases, but then you refer ambiguously to " this disease "---which one?? Here's how I would write your sentence The doctors' growing success in treating the Acpias Virus and the flu suggests that these diseases might not be as virulent as the press initially reported . Does this make sense? Mike :-)

Porkbun123 · Answer

Thank you Mike!

SC: "the doctors growing success..."

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