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1.4 nouns indicating a group of people 1. Some nouns that have a plural form are often used in the singular but with either a singular or a plural verb. Such nouns all relate to humans and include
army (
navy, air force )
, audience, board, cabinet (
council, government, senate etc,
class (as in group of students,
committee, company (
fi rm, corporation etc,
crew, department, faculty, family, jury, majority, media, minority, public, staff, team . The choice of singular or plural depends on whether the people who makeup the group are acting as individuals (generally plural verb preferred) or as a collective unit (generally singular verb.
2.
People requires a plural verb.
persons is often used
as a more formal version of people .
persons is frequently found in medical and psychology research papers, or when talking about the capacity of a machine to hold a certain number of persons. In other cases
people is often more appropriate particularly when
it refers to people in general, rather than a subset.
3.
Police is followed by a verb in the plural (e.g.
the police do
not intervene ).
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