Introduction
Subject-verb agreement (also called concord) is the grammatical rule that a verb must match its subject in number (singular or plural) and person (first, second, third). If the subject is singular, the verb must be singular; if the subject is plural, the verb must be plural.
This is one of the single most-tested grammar topics in Bangladeshi competitive exams. BCS Preliminary, Bank (Combined/AUST/BB), and IT-officer written papers almost always carry 2–5 marks on error-detection, sentence-correction, or fill-in-the-blank items that hinge on concord. The rules look simple but the exam deliberately hides the subject behind prepositional phrases, tricky pronouns, and collective nouns. Master the rules below and you can answer almost any such question in seconds.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Identify the true subject of a sentence even when it is separated from the verb.
- Apply the basic concord rule for singular and plural subjects across all persons.
- Handle the special cases: collective nouns, indefinite pronouns,
either/neither,each/every, correlative conjunctions, quantities, and inverted sentences. - Recognise nouns that look plural but are singular (and vice-versa).
- Detect and fix agreement errors quickly in exam-style questions.