Greatly influenced by the Protestant missionary Samuel Kirkland, the Oneida was the only one of the five-nation Iroquois League who sided with the colonists during the American Revolution.

A) Same
B) was alone of the five-nation Iroquois League when they sided
C) alone among the five nations of the Iroquois League sided
D) were the only ones out of the five nations of the Iroquois League in siding
E) only of the five-nation Iroquois League had sided

I picked A because I thought Oneida was singular and "was" corresponded. The answer is C and I am not sure why C is correct and A is incorrect. Thanks!

The phrase "the Oneida" refers to an entire tribe / group / race. It is used in the same way we'd say "the Americans" or "the French." They're trying to trick us b/c it doesn't end with an "s."

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Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT

is "WHO" correctly used in A?

If it's a nation I think use of who is wrong it should be which/that.

Am I correct?

'who' would be appropriate, because, as stacey has noted, 'the oneida' is analogous to 'the americans'. they're a group of people.

this gets complicated with native american tribes. for example,
* 'the iroquois nation' is an 'it', not a 'who', but
* 'the iroquois' is a plural 'who', for exactly the same reason cited by stacey above.

if you aren't from the u.s., i can understand your confusion. do try to internalize the patterns you see here, though; the gmat loooooves questions involving gratuitous facts about various minorities, and native american tribes certainly qualify for inclusion in that category.

hope that helps.

What are the errors in option "D" and "E".

isn't the Oneida, like the Americans or the French, a COLLECTIVE NOUN and thus should be paired with a singular verb, WAS?

Try it out. Would you say "the Americans is here" or "the Americans are here"? "The French is here" or "the French are here"?

These are not collective nouns in the way you are thinking - you're thinking about "team" or "army" or "country" - although these nouns are made up of many members in the group (and, hence, you'd say "members of the team are"), there is just one team, one army, one country. When you say "the Americans," you are actually talking about the members, plural.

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT

the Oneida was the only one of the five-nation...
I think the sentence takes the Oneida as 'one nation', should be a collective number, thus singular.

However, A is flawed with other problem. 'the Oneida was the only one of the five-nation Iroquois League(s)' illogically means that 'Oneida' was one of 'league(s)'. There should be only one league, and 'Oneida' was not a 'league' but one of its nations.

I think if we use 'among' instead of 'of' and 'which' instead of 'who', then this problem will be better solved.

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I am just another GMAT aspirant; not an instructor. Though I take every precautions not to mislead the forum by not jumping in to things which I am not 200% sure about, my explanations should not be taken as an official explanation.

wait - you're aware that the correct answer to this problem is (c), not (a), right?

the way you've written this post, it seems that you think (a) is the correct answer. it's not.

even with the suggestions you've put forward here, choice (a) would still include the singular verb "was", which doesn't work with "the Oneida" (which, as we've established, is plural).

Ron,

Even though, as you mentioned, the Oneida is plural, I still feel that it could be treated as singular also. ( as it is called a nation , and nation is singular. e.g. America is a great nation )

Also, I believe Gmat has written this question to confuse people between singular and plural, and force them to choose the wrong answer.

But, if we see the correct answer C, no doubt Gmat wants to stay away from this debate and hence they have not included was/were in the correct answer.

Thus, I think the best policy on these types of questions, in which we are not clear about the singular / plural, would be to sit back and try to find out an option which does not raise singular/ plural issue and thus avoids the confusion.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

More on Option A

I would like to add .....

Two Possibilities:
1) For somebody who doesn't know about Oneida would take it as a league/ some association/nation and hence singular. In that case, 'was' would be correct and 'who' would be incorrect.

2) If I know that "the Oneida" refers to an entire tribe / group / race and hence plural, then 'was' would be incorrect and 'who' would be correct.

So in both the cases option 'A' would be wrong.

Instructor please comment ?

no. this is an absolutely black-and-white issue; "feelings" are irrelevant.

i will admit that this is a problem that is brutal to non-native speakers of the english language. but, in this problem, "the oneida" functions identically to constructions such as "the french" or "the english", which are also uniformly plural.



"force" is way too strong a word to use.

there are no "trick questions" on the gmat. in fact, every question, when it's experimental, is tested to make sure that it follows a normal pattern - i.e., the highest-scoring students get it right almost 100% of the time, the lowest-scoring students get it right 20% of the time (i.e., random guessing), and there's a steep climb at some point in the middle (the "difficulty level" number).

if there were a problem that was a "trick question" and "forced people to choose the wrong answer", then even people with 800's would be missing it on a regular basis. if that happened, then the question would be rejected from the test during the experimental phase.

so, no, it's not a trick question.

on the other hand, if you meant to say "they write wrong answer choices that are tempting", then of course they do! how else would you make a question challenging?




nah. "the oneida" is totally plural, like "the english" or "the french".

it just so happens that you can write a nice compact version of the sentence that doesn't use a pronoun. there's no evil plotting here on GMAC's part.



i don't think that such a policy will do any better (or worse) than random guessing.

there are almost no ways around learning the rules, unfortunately.

good luck.

Please Ron or Stacey,

Could you comment if the observations made by rohit21384 are right ?

this is correct, yes. an insightful analysis.

note that the gmat will generally not include questions that REQUIRE certain specialized knowledge.
it's no coincidence that this question is written so that choice (a) is wrong no matter which way you interpret "the oneida", as nicely explained by rohit here.