The sentence

3. We can use singular or plural verbs with nouns like the majority, the public and the youth
of today: The public want (or wants) to know how they are (or it is) governed.
There words do not have regular plural forms: (Not *the publics*)
4. We use only plural verbs with nouns like cattle, the military, people, the police and
vermin:
There are too many people in the world.
(Not *There is too many people* *There are too many peoples*)
there words do not have normal plural forms, but note that peoples means ‘national
populations’: The peoples of the Arab World have a common language.
Nouns with a plural form + singulat or plural verbs: ‘acoustics’
1. Nouns ending in –ics:
- athletics, gymnastics, linguistics, mathematics (maths) and physics take a singular verb:
Mathematics is not the most poplar school subject. (Not *Mathematics are*)
- acoustics, economics, phonetics and statistics take a singular verb only when they refer
to the academic subject: Statistics is a branch of economics. (Not *statistics are*)
They take a plural verb when the reference is specific: Your statistics are unreliable.
2. Nouns like crossroads, headquarters, kennels, series, species and works are singular when
they refer to one: This species of moth is rare.
They are plural when they refer to more than one: There are thousands of species.
Nouns with a plural form + plural verbs: ‘trousers’
1. There nouns have a plural form only and are followed by a plural verb:
glasses (= spectacles), jeans, pants, pliers, pyjamas, scissors, shorts, tights, trousers:
My trousers are torn.
All these nouns can combine with a pair of, (two) pairs of:
I bought a pair of shorts yesterday and two pairs of trousers.
2. These nouns are plural in form and are followed by a plural verb:
belongings, brains (= intellect), clothes, congratulations, earnings, goods, manners, stairs:
Were those clothes expensive?
G. Gender
Male and female word forms: ‘waiter/waitress’
1. In many languages, the names of things such as book, chair, radio, table may be
grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter. Often gender doesn’t relate to sex, so that
the word for ‘girl’ might be neuter and the word for ‘chair’ might be feminine’
2. These is no grammatical gender for nouns in English. Though there can be exceptions, we
use only he and she to refer to people and it to refer to everything else. It is the
pronouns, not the nouns, that tell us whether the reference is to male or female:
He is the person you spoke to. She is the person you spoke to.
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