Verb+ing + sing/plur

[fbornet]

I bought the manhattan GMAT sentence correction and on page 47 we have a rule : subject of a sentence with an -ing phrase requires singular. example: HAVING good friends IS a wonderful thing.

On the GMAT review (13th edition) sentence correction Q14 page 706, we have : Rising inventories,..., possibly leads to production....
The correction says that : "plural subject inventories does not agree with the singular verb leads".

Is the correction wrong ?

[Willy]

I bought the manhattan GMAT sentence correction and on page 47 we have a rule : subject of a sentence with an -ing phrase requires singular. example: HAVING good friends IS a wonderful thing.

On the GMAT review (13th edition) sentence correction Q14 page 706, we have : Rising inventories,..., possibly leads to production....
The correction says that : "plural subject inventories does not agree with the singular verb leads".

Is the correction wrong ?

'Having good friends' is a subject phrase and hence is singular.

in sentence,

Rising inventories,..., possibly leads to production....

Here 'rising inventories' is not the subject phrase.

'inventories' is the subject and 'rising' is acting as a modifier to inventories.

[jlucero]

Willy's got it again. You can do a common sense check here by thinking about which of these makes more sense:

The rising (of inventories) leads to production cutbacks.
The inventories (that are rising) lead to production cutbacks.

It's the fact that we have too much of a THING (inventories) not a PROCESS (rising) that causes us to cutback on a production.

That said, in real life, you could make a convincing argument either way, which is why the incorrect answer choices all have at least one other problem in them, problems I would notice a lot faster than the subj/verb issue here. On the GMAT, I'd think about this for 10-15 seconds and if I couldn't figure out which side to go with, I'd move onto other issues.