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In my recent reading of books written by educated native speakers of English (not those who live in other countries than the UK and the US), I find sentences like "There's a lot of people ...." many times and I think they might be wrong, "is" should have been "are".

Another question is that here is a sentence: We would like you to give a speech at our meeting, starting at 9:00 am on October 8th. I want to know which starts at 9 am, the meeting or the speech? How can I ascertain the right choice?

Please give me your valuable advices, thank you very much.

SitangCampus wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2019 2:24 pmIn my recent reading of books written by educated native speakers of English (not those who live in other countries than the UK and the US), I find sentences like "There's a lot of people ...." many times and I think they might be wrong, "is" should have been "are".

In informal writing:
There's a lot of people...
There are lots of people...

SitangCampus wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2019 2:24 pmAnother question is that here is a sentence: We would like you to give a speech at our meeting, starting at 9:00 am on October 8th. I want to know which starts at 9 am, the meeting or the speech? How can I ascertain the right choice?

Impossible to say though one might guess that the meeting starts at 9.

i personally think "there's a lot of people" should be right??? and the meeting probably starts at 9. not sure about it. if you are not sure, just arrive there one hour earlier lol. then i can assure you that won't be anything going wrong.

Some meetings have time limits for each speaker, if anyone has his speech exceed the time, he may be asked to stop. I remembered being halted a few times at the meetings, that was very embarrassing.

one hour early lol! They should phrase it more clearly!^^