No One Can Score 30/30 In This Tricky Plural Forms Test

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We gave this test to 100 high school students and no one got more than 15/30 correctly. Can you beat those odds?

#language #knowledge

What are your thoughts on this subject?

1081 Comments

Joy Holbrook

Don't just complain, downvote and report. It takes seconds.

Joy Holbrook

Susan Lake-Harris, thank you. I was marked as a fail but got them all correct.

Susan Lake-Harris

Looks like everyone failed - including me! I checked the answers – of which I was correct for 29... I suspect we all fail if we don’t get 30/30. For the correct answers, see below: Elves; Runners-up; Sheep; Roofs (except rooves is often still used in speech though not considered standard anymore); Diagnoses; Bison; Species; Humans; Syllabuses AND Syllabi – both are correct; Culs-de-sac in preference to cul-de-sacs – the second is more common in casual English; Memos; Cellos (because it’s from Italian, so no “e”); Crises; Appendices; Oases; Wives; Women; Calves; Teeth; Deer (though deers is sometimes used if referring to different species as a group – e.g. a red deer with a roe deer with a reindeer all in one enclosure at a zoo); Halves; Candy-men; Moose; Fungi; Domino AND Dominoes – both are correct; Curricula (though curriculums is being used outside academic writing in the good old USA); Emphases; Atlases (if you’re speaking English, but it could be Atlantes if you go with Greek); Mangoes (unless you’re in the US where it’s usually spelt without the “e”); and finally, Criteria.