Collective nouns are words that refer to a group of subjects (could be people or objects) but are not necessarily considered plural; in fact, on the GMAT, they mostly take singular verbs.
Examples:
- Army
- Family
- Committee
- Wealth
- Police, etc.
As you might have noticed collective nouns, more often than not, refer to a group of people, a fact that gives rise to a unique problem:
Because people can sometimes behave as a group and sometimes as individuals, collective nouns can be either singular or plural, depending on the context in which they are being used. This can create a lot of confusion with regards to subject-verb agreement.
Look at the following sentence for example:
The hockey team follows its coach wherever he goes.
In the above sentence the entire team is doing the same thing in unison (i.e. following the coach), hence the collective noun 'team' is considered singular and so takes the singular verb 'follows' and the singular pronoun 'its'.
Now, let's modify this sentence a little:
After the match is over, the hockey team shower, change their clothes and go back to their hotel rooms.
Here each player is bathing individually, changing into different clothes, and going to a different hotel room. If you say 'the team is going back to its hotel room' it means that they are all going to the same room which is not the case. So the collective noun cannot be considered singular and takes the plural verb 'shower' and plural pronoun 'their'.
To Sum it Up:
- Collective Nouns can be either singular or plural depending on the context
- The key is to first understand the meaning of the sentence to figure out whether the group is acting like one entity or different individual entities. (Single entity - Singular / Individual entities - Plural)
- In case you are confused go with the Singular verb as the GMAT favors these over plural verbs.
I'll leave you with an interesting collective noun that I bet you didn't know about:
"a murder of crows"
Yes that's what a group of crows is called!
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