While a confederation of independent states _____ certain advantages in terms of local autonomy, it often struggles to coordinate unified...

Let's begin by understanding the meaning of this sentence. We'll use our understanding of pause points and segment the sentence as shown - understanding and assimilating the meaning of each segment bit by bit!

Sentence Structure

• While a confederation of independent states _____ certain advantages
• in terms of local autonomy,
• it often struggles to coordinate unified responses
• to external threats.

Understanding the Meaning

Let's start reading from the beginning:

'While a confederation of independent states...'

• We're talking about a confederation - that's a loose alliance or union of separate states that keep their independence.

Now here's where we need to fill in the blank:

• 'a confederation of independent states _____ certain advantages in terms of local autonomy'

Let's look at our choices:

• A. have offered (plural verb)
• B. offers (singular verb)
• C. offer (plural verb)
• D. are offering (plural verb)

So we're deciding between singular and plural verb forms.

What's the subject that needs to agree with our verb?

• The subject is 'a confederation'
  • 'confederation' is a singular noun
  • 'of independent states' is just a descriptive phrase telling us what kind of confederation we're talking about
  • Even though 'states' is plural, it's not the subject - it's part of the phrase 'of independent states' that describes 'confederation'

Since 'confederation' is singular, we need a singular verb.

The correct answer is B. offers

Now let's read the rest to see the complete picture:

• 'it often struggles to coordinate unified responses to external threats'
  • The 'it' refers back to the confederation
  • This confirms we have a singular subject
  • The sentence is showing a contrast: confederations offer advantages (local autonomy) but also have disadvantages (hard to coordinate responses to threats)

GRAMMAR CONCEPT APPLIED

Subject-Verb Agreement with Intervening Phrases

When a descriptive phrase comes between the subject and the verb, the verb must still agree with the actual subject - not with nouns that appear in the descriptive phrase.

The pattern looks like this:

Basic structure:

• Subject + descriptive phrase with different number + verb
• The verb agrees with the subject only

Example 1:

• "A collection of rare coins is valuable"
• Subject: "collection" (singular)
• Descriptive phrase: "of rare coins" (contains plural "coins")
• Verb: "is" (singular - matches "collection")

Example 2:

• "The leader of several nations was present"
• Subject: "leader" (singular)
• Descriptive phrase: "of several nations" (contains plural "nations")
• Verb: "was" (singular - matches "leader")

In our question:

• Subject: "confederation" (singular)
• Descriptive phrase: "of independent states" (contains plural "states")
• Verb needed: "offers" (singular - matches "confederation")

The key is identifying the true subject (the main noun doing the action) and not being distracted by other nouns that appear between the subject and verb.