altairahmad wrote:
However, I am still being thrown off by my concept of 'of' being a preposition. Is it that the 'of' used is part of 'number of' rather than 'of communities'. ? Is this usage 'number of' idiomatic ?
Also, as per
MGMAT, 'a number of' takes plural verb. How does that fit in here ?
Hi
altairahmad, daagh sir has already explained it.
Basically you might be slightly confused between
subject-verb agreement and
relative pronoun reference.
Following are two
different concepts:
- From a
subject-verb agreement perspective, words in prepositional phrases
cannot be the subjects
-
that modifies the
nearest word or phrase that makes sense
Let's take an example:
One of every three businesses that fail/fails every year has/have a flawed business model.
The above sentence has
two clauses:
1)
One of every three businesses has/have a flawed business model.
Should it be
has or
have? Well, this is a
subject-verb agreement issue. Here,
businesses cannot be the subject because
businesses is a part of the
prepositional phrase
of every three businesses. Hence
one is the subject and so, the correct verb is
has.
2)
that fail/fails every year Should it be
fail or
fails? Well, this is a
relative pronoun reference issue. In other words, whether it is
fail or
fails, depends on what
that is modifying. If
that modifies something
singular, then the correct verb is
fails; on the other hand, if
that modifies something
plural, then the correct verb is
fail.
So,
what does
that modify? As mentioned above,
that modifies the
nearest word or phrase that makes sense. In this case, that word is
businesses. Since
businesses is
plural, the correct verb is
have.
So, the final correct sentence is:
One of every three businesses that fail every year has a flawed business model.
p.s. Our book
EducationAisle Sentence Correction Nirvana discusses
this concept of Subject-Verb agreement, its application and examples in significant detail. If you or someone is interested, PM me your email-id; I can mail the corresponding section.