treat this as singular or plural?

Could you tell me which is correct?

"More than 90% of the drugs are.. " or "More than 90% of the drugs is.."

Thank you very much. 

Marius Hancu

are: think proximity to drugs 

Is that really a good answer? Shouldn't we teach people to think about the subject of the sentence when deciding on verb agreement? The subject of a sentence is never in a prepositional phrase like that. More is the subject, and more is plural. You always say "more are," not "more is."

Edamame

Hello all,

Could you tell me which is correct?

""More than 90% of the drugs are.. " or "More than 90% of the drugs is" or "More than 90% of the drugs is.."

Thank you very much. 

'More than 90% of the drugs' should be many  tablets, capsules, etc of the drugs. Therefore, you should use 'are'.

ytsirk

Kooyeen

It's not true "more" is plural... if you had water instead of drugs, you would say that more than 50% of the water is polluted, wouldn't you? Water is uncountable, so you use a singular verb...

I apologize for not qualifying my comment. In that sentence, more is plural. Yes it is.

I agree with ytsirk. Y'all need better examples though. "More" isn't a good example because it can be singular or plural depending on context.

But if you say something like "One of the apples is missing." Then you don't want to teach people to think about the proximity of apples, do you? The subject is "One" and so the verb is singular. If you teach someone to look at the word closest to the verb, they won't learn it correctly.

Edamame

Thank you all. I thought I might have to consider "more than 90% of the drugs" as one group. But in this case, it seems I can simply consider that the number of drugs mentioned here is more than 1; therefore, I should use "are."

Yes. That way you'll be more correct more often than if you go with Marius' thought process.