There is/ There are

[reubenj21]

Hello!

I recently came across a sentence " There are a bank, a nail salon, and a day care centre in this shopping plaza."

Now this particular sentence sounded so wrong to me, that I wanted to pull my hair out. But I later found out that this is the grammatically
correct way to write the sentence.

I did some research on many websites and I inferred from those resources that it is quite acceptable to use "IS" in place of "ARE"
in the above sentence.

So if I see a question like " There __IS__ a bank, a nail salon, and a day care centre in this shopping plaza." GMAT, should i mark it wrong or right?

Thanks a ton people!

[RonPurewal]

"Is" is wrong. Plural subjects go with plural verbs.

Hopefully, these websites were discussing spoken English, whose conventions are considerably more relaxed/flexible than those of the written language.

If these websites claim that "There is a, b, and c" is correct in formal written English, then they are garbage websites. Avoid.