5 exercises — master tricky subject-verb agreement patterns that commonly appear in technical documentation: complex noun phrases, correlative conjunctions, and collective nouns.
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1 / 5
The list of deprecated endpoints ___ available in the migration guide.
When "the [noun] of [plural noun]" is the subject, the verb agrees with the HEAD noun (the first noun), not the noun in the prepositional phrase. "The list" is the head noun — it is singular → "is." Ignoring "of deprecated endpoints," the subject is "the list." This is a very common error in technical writing: "the number of requests is..." (singular), "a set of requirements is..." (singular), "the group of microservices is..." (singular). Exception: "a number of" (meaning "several") takes a plural: "A number of bugs were found."
2 / 5
Neither the staging environment nor the production servers ___ been updated yet.
With "neither...nor" (and "either...or"), the verb agrees with the subject CLOSEST to it — this is the "proximity rule." "...nor the production servers have" → the closest subject is "the production servers" (plural) → plural verb "have." If the order were reversed ("neither the production servers nor the staging environment"), the answer would be "has" (singular). This is the standard rule for correlative conjunctions in formal technical English.
3 / 5
The data ___ stored in three separate regional clusters to ensure redundancy.
In technical and computing English, "data" is most commonly treated as an uncountable noun (singular): "the data is stored," "the data shows," "this data was corrupted." In formal academic writing, "data are" is grammatically strict (data = Latin plural of datum), but in technical documentation, engineering teams, and most professional IT communication, "data is" is universally accepted and preferred. Using "data are" in engineering contexts sounds overly formal and is unusual in modern usage.
4 / 5
The number of failed requests per minute ___ increased significantly since the last deployment.
"The number of" + plural noun takes a SINGULAR verb: "the number of failed requests has increased." This is different from "a number of" (meaning "several"), which takes a plural: "A number of requests have failed." Mnemonic: "The number" = one specific count (singular); "a number" = some unspecified quantity (plural). In monitoring and SRE dashboards: "The number of 5xx errors has exceeded the threshold," "The number of active connections is dropping."
5 / 5
Every microservice, every database, and every load balancer ___ included in the disaster recovery plan.
When "every" precedes each item in a compound subject connected by "and," the subject is treated as singular and takes a singular verb: "Every microservice, every database, and every load balancer is included." The word "every" forces singular agreement regardless of the compound structure. Compare: "Every engineer and every manager is responsible." This differs from plain compound subjects without "every": "The microservice, the database, and the load balancer are included" (plural).