The beginning ...

Hi Guys ,
This is our first blog. The purpose of this is to share our experiences and knowledge about writing the GMAT , about B Schools in general or just about any topic under the sun.We had a great start to our preparations yesterday when four of us sat in the conference room and opened up the Subject-Verb agreement inside out :) . It was immensely helpful.All thanks to Shiv's detailed research on the topic that we now are confident of taking on the Subject-Verb agreement problems head on. And i'm sure ,after a couple of weeks, i can say the same for all topics that we cover. It goes to show that we mean 'business'( pun intended? ;) ).And by that I mean that we will not settle for anything less than a 760.We keep our bars high and we make sure we get there. There is only one way, hard work.Of course it sounds cliche, but it works.We have the passion and the commitment , nothing comes in our way.
Now, let me give a brief about the topics that we covered yesterday : First we discussed about additive phrases - rule is whenever we get the structure "X (additive phrase) Y " , X will always decide the verb form. Then we discussed about "Either/Neither X or/nor Y" , Y always decides the verb form. If Either/Neither is used alone then verb is singular (Correct me if i'm wrong ! ). We also went through the countable and uncountable nouns .Few important things to remember are : 1) Material and abstract nouns are uncountable.
2) police,cattle ,thanks,earnings are always plural. 3) Subjects,diseases,games , 'News','Information', and activities are singular. Then comes the all important SANAM : Some All None Any Most/More - look for "OF" construction . The "One of the " structure is always followed by a plural , the verb takes singular form. eg: One of the students is going home. BUT if the "One of the " structure is followed by a pronoun (that) then the verb is plural.eg: Lake X is  one of the lakes that flow through the country. "The number of"- Singular. " A number of" - Plural.  When subject is preceded by "Each /Every" verb is singular. BUT , if "Each/Every" follows the subject , verb is plural.eg :They each are great tennis players.


The above are just few important points that we need to remember. It does not cover each and every topic discussed.
All in all , a great start.Lets keep up the momentum. Cheers !

~ Jyotishman