Which is correct?
- There is a hundred of people in the hall.
OR
- There are a hundred of people in the hall.
a hundred means one hundred but determiner ‘a’ is singular. Which verb should be used, is or are?
Learn English – subject-verb agreement with “a hundred”
countable-nounssingular-vs-pluralsubject-verb-agreement
Related Solutions
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
Depending on the formality and the speaker's level of excitement, I would not find either remarkable. "A hundred people" could easily be taken to be a synonym for "a crowd", in which case "is" would make grammatical sense.
"Are" is more generally applicable and more formally correct. If "a hundred" is an attempt to present a somewhat accurate count, then "are" is the only appropriate choice. But a speaker who was just trying to say "there's a crowd" might use "is", whether because she thinks of the hundred people as a unified mass, or by analogy with something like "There's a couple cans of soda in the fridge" or other casual uses of measure words and counts as collective singulars. "There's" to refer to counts of people is less common than "there are", but it has nontrivial representation, especially in recent times.
So which one a person would say depends on what the person is thinking about and how carefully he or she is monitoring his or her speech. What you see "in the wild" is not necessarily what is formally grammatically correct.
However, I would point out that the biggest sign of non-native speech occurs in both your examples: we use "a hundred" as a quantity, not as a measure word, so "a hundred of people" would seem wrong to me. We'd just say "a hundred people." (A measure word, on the other hand, is something like "pair" in "pair of pants" or "head" in "head of cattle"--there it represents a basic unit of counting which must always be used to count the object in question.) So might say "a lot of people" but never "*a hundred of people".