I would be grateful for advice on the following sentence:
'It is not known how many escape attempts were made, but only a small percentage were successful.'
A friend tells me that the word after 'percentage' should be 'was', but I think that 'were' is correct because 'escape attempts' is plural. I live in the UK so the rules here may be slightly different than the US, but to substitute 'was' for 'were' in this sentence seems really odd to me.
Verb subject agreement in a two-clause sentence
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Re: Verb subject agreement in a two-clause sentence
You are absolutely correct. In ANY variety of standard English the verb would be plural!