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English Language
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Analyze the advanced syntactic structure, correlative conjunction governance, and proximity rule in the following complex sentence:"Not only the board of directors but also the managing director were held accountable for the catastrophic financial irregularities discovered during the annual audit."Identify whether the underlined verb requires grammatical modification according to standard English syntax.
✓ Correct! Well done.
✗ Not quite — the correct answer is highlighted above.
Detailed Explanation
According to standard English grammar rules regarding subject-verb agreement, when two subjects are joined by correlative conjunctions such as 'either... or', 'neither... nor', or 'not only... but also', the verb agrees with the subject closest to it (known as the Wikipedia Reference of proximity or locus). In this sentence, the subject closest to the verb is the singular noun phrase 'the managing director'. Therefore, the plural verb 'were' must be corrected to the singular form 'was'.
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