Subject-Verb Agreement (basic)

"He have a blue ball."
"The boys has to go home for dinner as it is late."

Looks wrong, isn't it? Their errors occur in the area where we call 'Subject-Verb agreement'. This is were the verb in the sentence does not match with the subject (or their do-ers).

Take for example: "Malek is a footballer."
The subject is Malek, therefore we use 'is'. Simply put - we are talking about one person - Malek - in the sentence. The verb changes if the number of people change.
"Malek and Fandi are footballers."
The verb changes due to the increase in the number of people and the noun 'footballer' that follows in the sentence have to be changed too. This should be simple stuff, chicken feed.

A level of difficulty when they refer to one person or item in a group.
Example: "One of the boys ___ (kick) now."
In this case, the word 'now' tells us it is happening, so we have to use the present continuous form. So we say 'is kicking'. We are referring to a single 'one' of the boys. I always use this rule 'One person is lonely. So one person has a friend, called 'S'' with my students.

Whenever we see 'One __ of the ___', we can safely say we shall pick the singular form as our answer. The problem is that we have to tell between using present or past tense. We have to look for clues from the rest of the question.
"One of the girls ______ (clap) her hands. The other girls looked at her, astounded." Answer here is 'clapped', clue is 'looked'.

Then we have the items or people being grouped together. Example: 'The bouquet of flowers ______ (sit) beautifully on the table." 'Bouquet' refers to a single 'bunch' (nicely wrapped). Do not look at the words 'of flowers' when you answer the question. They are there to trick you.

The words 'Each', 'Every', 'Everybody', and 'Everyone' are all to be taken as singular nouns too. The verbs that follow them in the sentence all take the singular form. These sentences are correct:

a. Each of you is unique. (It changes when you say 'All' - 'All of you are unique.')
b. Every student has to work hard towards scoring well.
c. Everybody reads a book when they come to school in the morning. (It'll be good, but not every student does that...)
d. Everyone sings the National Anthem during flag raising.  (Really?)

The last tricky part is that there are some nouns that end with a letter 's'; they DO NOT take the plural form!  For example: 'Mathematics is my favourite subject.' or 'Chess is a game I always lose at.'
Or 'The news shows a man singing to his dog to rouse it from its deep slumber.'  Some nouns, however, may take the plural form, even though there is no 's'.  Example:  'The cattle are grazing the large green field.'  or 'Police are looking for the suspect, whom they believe is a tall Chinese male."

There are quite a few more examples, but I shall not attempt to list everything here.  Read and ask yourself questions as you do.  "Why is this written in this way?"  "Shouldn't this be (the other way) instead?"

Have fun trying to make sense of this mysterious language.  While you are at it, you might wish to try these to see how much you have understood:

a.  One of the babies ____ (be) crying loudly.

b.  A few of the boys _____ (be) being punished now for playing truant yesterday.

c.  Each student ______ (borrow) a book from the library later.

d.  None of the dwarves ________ (drink) the poisoned water that is being passed to them.

e.  Billards _______ (be) a game Joe likes to play.