IELTS grammar: Subject-Verb Agreement

Subject-verb agreement looks like the easiest rule in English grammar, and in short sentences it is: singular subjects take singular verbs, plural subjects take plural verbs, and almost nobody gets "The student studies" or "The students study" wrong. The reason this topic still earns its own dedicated review, and still shows up as a marked error in IELTS Writing scripts from candidates who are otherwise well past Band 6, is that the rule breaks down under exactly one condition: distance. The further apart the subject and its verb sit, and the more words, phrases, and clauses come between them, the more likely a writer is to agree the verb with whatever noun happens to be nearest, rather than with the actual grammatical subject. This is a genuinely different error from not knowing the rule — every candidate who makes it can recite the singular/plural rule correctly when asked directly — which is exactly why it survives into higher-band writing and needs a specific, deliberate check rather than general revision.

The single most common trigger is a prepositional phrase or other modifying phrase sitting between the subject and the verb, pulling the verb's agreement toward the nearest noun instead of the true subject. "The reasons for this trend, despite the government's efforts, remains unclear" is wrong: the subject is the plural "reasons," not the singular "efforts" that happens to sit just before the verb, so "remains" should be "remain." A reliable mechanical fix is to mentally delete every prepositional phrase and parenthetical aside between the subject and the verb before checking agreement: "The reasons... remain unclear" makes the plural obvious once the interrupting material is stripped away. This becomes especially important in Task 2 essays, where longer, more sophisticated noun phrases ("the availability of resources," "the level of investment in infrastructure") are exactly the kind of vocabulary upgrade that raises Lexical Resource but simultaneously creates more distance for agreement errors to hide in.

Collective nouns — words like "government," "team," "committee," "public," and "population" that name a single group made up of many people — are a second recurring source of error, mainly because usage genuinely differs between formal written British English (the register IELTS Writing rewards) and casual spoken usage, where a collective noun sometimes takes a plural verb to emphasise the individuals within it. For IELTS Writing, treat collective nouns as singular by default: "The government has announced new measures," "The committee is expected to report next month," not "have announced" or "are expected." There is a genuine exception when a sentence deliberately emphasises the members of the group acting as separate individuals rather than the group as a single unit — "The team disagree among themselves about the best approach" is defensible in some varieties of English — but this exception is rare enough, and risky enough to get wrong, that defaulting to singular agreement for collective nouns is the safer, more consistently correct choice for a Writing script.