Noun/Verb Disagreement

With the growth of online shopping over the past few years, the demand of online payment methods have visibly grew.

I have found the above sentence in an English daily.

The subject of the sentence is 'demand' which requires to be accompanied by a singular verb, but it has been matched by a plural verb which is in the present perfect tense. The 'grew' should be in the past participle.

Hence, the sentence in question should have been in either of the following versions:-

"With the growth of online shopping over the past few years, the demand of online payment methods has visibly grown." or "With the growth of online shopping over the past few years, online payment methods have visibly grown."

Correct use of phrases

Entering Form Four, if one chose to study in the Science stream, it was as good as studying in an English school because General Mathematics, Additional Mathematics, General Science, Pure Science, Chemistry, Physics and Biology were taught in English.

"Entering Form Four" in the above sentence (which is taken from an article of a popular national English daily) can be a noun phrase or an adjective phrase.

If it is a noun phrase, the phrase has rendered the following preparatory pronoun 'it' redundant; but if it is an adjective phrase, this participial phrase appears to qualify the said pronoun 'it' making its description out of place.

To be grammatically sound, the sentence needs to be reworded as "If one entering Form Four chose to study in the Science stream, it was as good as studying in an English school because General Mathematics, Additional Mathematics, General Science, Pure Science, Chemistry, Physics and Biology were taught in English."

Of course, it can also be "If one chose to study in the Science stream when entering Form Four, it was as good as studying in an English school because General Mathematics, Additional Mathematics, General Science, Pure Science, Chemistry, Physics and Biology were taught in English."

For participial phrases, please see my earlier posting of December 21, 2009.

Adverb to modify adjective

Personal Internet Banking will be temporary unavailable on
10 April, 2011 from 5:00am - 7:00am.

I have come across the above notice from a bank's website.

We need to use an 'adverb' to modify an 'adjective' to make the latter's description clearer.

The aforesaid notice should have been worded as "Personal Internet Banking will be temporarily unavailable on 10 April, 2011 from 5:00am - 7:00am.

The noun 'bacteria' is plural

Friendly bacteria in the gut helps confer many health benefits.

The above sentence appears in an article of a popular English daily.

It looks like a heading created by a sub-editor/editor of the newspaper.

In the write-up, the word 'bacteria' is used many times - sometimes accompanied by a singular verb and sometimes a plural one.

A reference to an online dictionary reveals that the said word is a plural noun and its singular is 'bacterium'.

Hence, the sentence in the first paragraph above should have been "Friendly bacteria in the gut help confer many health benefits"; and of course, all singular finite verbs used in the article should be replaced by plural ones.