subject-verb-agreement
Not sure if somebody already posted this question or not but I just need some clarity on the sentence below.
Should the ultrasound demonstrate myomas I will discuss her case in our meeting.
Question: Should it be -> Should the ultrasound demonstrates
Please explain
Although what we need are is possible in some cases, in this case it's a poor choice. Why? Because all three what we needs refers to the same thing, and that thing is either singular or plural, not both. It's quite strange to refer to it first as though it's plural, then as though it's singular.
The best choice is to use is all three times:
What we need isn't protests.
What we need is new generations able to voice their opinions.
What we need is Chinese men and women who are eloquent speakers of foreign languages.
The parallelism is stronger rhetorically in any case.
Besides which, is is the more common choice overall. Take a look at this chart of four n-grams in the Google Books corpus:
From this chart, it seems that is is eight times more common than are; and specifically with negatives, it's ten times more common. So both occur, but is is clearly favored.
Best Answer
No, it absolutely shouldn't because that's just incorrect grammar. All modal verbs (those are words like can, could, should, would, may, might and a whole slew of others), at least in Modern English, knock out all the s's on the ends of the verbs that immediately follow them (as well as all the to's). In other words, modal verbs should only be followed by bare infinitives. Here's a simple example:
The only time you tack an s on the end of a verb is when it is the first verb that immediately follows the subject in third-person singular form (those are typically singular nouns and the pronouns he, she, it and one). For example:
As for the sentence itself, it's fine as far as English is concerned. I think what we've got here is called a subjunctive form in a conditional sentence. The sentence would definitely be easier to read, if we put a comma after the word myomas:
This is grammatically and structurally the same as saying the following:
That's a very common phrasing in English and one way to understand this construction is to substitute should with if: