Hi there,

Could you please clarify whether Question 7 in the 'Pronouns Strategy' is framed correctly?

The Question states: " The Police have significantly reduced...."

Is Police considered as a collective noun? If yes, then based on the explanation in the Subj-Verb agreement chapter shouldn't the verb for this collective noun be singular, for eg: "The Police has..."

Also, on a side note what is the best way to search whether a certain question has been previously asked in the MGMAT forum especially in the section for GPrep Qs (both Quant and Verbal)? It is very difficult to get the search results to match the question you are looking for. I end up having to browse through the entire forum, page by page to locate the particular question. It goes without saying that such a process is very cumbersome and time consuming. Ofcourse I exhaust all the different keyword searches before I decide to follow this route. In fact, it has happened to me multiple times wherein I was unable to find a match for the question Iam looking for but was able to find a post for the same question while going through the forum page by page.

So sometimes it is possible that people may post questions that may have been addressed in the past but unfortunately since they cannot locate the question using the search, they have to post it again without knowing that a post already exists. Any suggestions on how to avoid this?

thanx in advance.

Good question. "the police" is considered plural; the longer form used to be "the policemen..." but poliitical correctness has shortened it to "the police." Think of the construction "the police" as similar to "the fish" - there's no "s" at the end of "fish" either, but if I'm pointing to the 5 fish in a fish tank, I would say "the fish," not "the fishes." Just two examples of exceptions to the "add an 's' to make a noun plural" rule.

"police force" would be a collective noun, and therefore singular.

The best way to use the search function is to pick an unusual word or a sequence of a few words in a problem (and use quotes around the sequence) and search only for that. On a pure quant problem with no words or only a few very common words (eg, "is x=6?"), yes, it is very difficult to search for something like that - unfortunately, there isn't a good solution to that problem.

But if the problem is something like "In the given coordinate plane, the x-coordinate blah blah blah" do a search for "given coordinate plane" for example. (And, again, don't forget to use quotes!)

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT