Quantity describing expressions
Half of the people like me.
‘Half of’ is a fractional expression that describes ‘how much’ in a sentence. You can leave out the fractional expression and get a simpler sentence like this:
Half of the people like me.
‘People’ is a singular noun, even though it represents more than one person. So we need the singular form of ‘like’, which is also ‘like’:
Other fractional expressions can be either singular or plural, depending on what noun they’re linked with:
One-tenth of my dollars go towards food.
In this sentence, the noun is a countable noun and we’re talking about more than one dollar. So we use the plural form of the verb - ‘go’.
One-tenth of the money goes towards food.
In this sentence, the noun is not a countable one, so we need to use a singular form of the verb - ‘goes’.
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