Free Subject Verb Agreement Quiz – Practice Online
Read each sentence and choose the verb form that correctly agrees with its subject. Get instant feedback on each choice. After answering all 5 questions correctly, detailed explanations will appear below each question to help you understand singular and plural agreement rules. Test and learn in a simple and fun way.
Why "The Team Are" Sounds Wrong to Some People and Right to Others
The basic rule of subject-verb agreement seems simple: singular subjects take singular verbs, plural subjects take plural verbs ("he runs," "they run"). But real sentences constantly test the edges of this rule — collective nouns, subjects joined by "or," and long sentences where the subject and verb are separated by several other words.
The most common mistake happens in long sentences, where a phrase between the subject and verb causes people to accidentally agree the verb with the wrong noun — "the list of items on the shelf need attention" should be "needs," because the true subject is "list," not "items." This is exactly the kind of error this quiz targets.
Other tricky cases include indefinite pronouns ("everyone," "each," "neither") which are almost always treated as singular even though they can feel plural in meaning, and subjects joined by "either...or" or "neither...nor," where the verb agrees with the noun closest to it.
When checking your own writing, try mentally removing any phrase between the subject and the verb — it usually makes the correct agreement obvious immediately. Since this error type shows up constantly in exams, our Error Detection Quiz is excellent extra practice.