An investigation is being conducted to see whether the marines or the army ___________ responsible for the failure to make the area safe last year.
Choose one answer.
a. was
b. has been
c. were
d. have been
Answer: C?
yes
[quote=“Bigbang007”]
An investigation is being conducted to see whether the marines or the army ___________ responsible for the failure to make the area safe last year.
IMHO:
(1) I would choose “was.”
(a) The “rule” is: the verb agrees with the noun after the word “or.”
(b) In American English, the word “army” is singular.
Your opinion is wrong James.
the marines
or
the army
two bodies - plural
If the sentence said
An investigation is being conducted to see whether the army ___________ responsible for the failure to make the area safe last year.
then you would be correct.
[quote=“Beeesneees”]
Your opinion is wrong James.
If the thread starter will check some books on subject-verb agreement, he will discover for himself who is “wrong.”
OK, my apologies. That is the ‘rule’.
The vast majority of native English speakers do not follow that ‘rule’.
As it turned out, the thread starter seems to be a bit of a time-waster weho posts the same questions across a number of groups.
Yes, as the Language Coach says, many people do not observe the rule. In fact, some books suggest rewriting such a sentence in another way in order to escape the dreaded “rule.”
Time-waster? I post it to the number of groups to get the correct answer and opinion about the question. Is it wrong?
Hello bigbang007, in my opinion, the answer is D.
An investigation is being conducted to see whether the marines or the army have been responsible for the failure to make the area safe last year.
is being conducted ~ present continuous, passive voice
have been ~ present perfect
Thanks
‘have been’ is incorrect. It is not a present tense because ‘last year’ indicates that the incident took place wholly in the past.