not the only cohort

mia0815

mia0815

Senior Member
Taiwanese
The 1 percent are not the only cohort playing sports so professionally and doggedly as children, but it does have the resources for additional travel teams, coaches, 5:00 a.m. squash practices, and trainers.

I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the 1%
by Blythe Grossberg

I'm not sure how the underlined is related to the latter part of the sentence.
cohort

Please help. Thank you.
 
    • Without more context, we can’t be sure what “it” refers to. It might have an antecedent in the previous sentence.

    If not, then the sentence is badly written and the it is intended to mean the cohort (group).
     
    I take 'it' as referring to the 1 percent, which the author apparently considers a socioeconomic cohort. Another cohort that plays sports so professionally and doggedly might, for example, be the cohort made up of households in the 2%-5% range.

    The author is using 'the 1 percent' as a collective plural ('The 1 percent are') in the first clause and as a singular collective noun in the second clause ('it is').
     
    I can’t see how that works, with “the 1 per cent” treated as plural? Why would the writer not then say “they do have” rather than “it does”?
     
    lingobingo said:
    I can’t see how that works, with “the 1 per cent” treated as plural? Why would the writer not then say “they do have” rather than “it does”?
    Click to expand...
    It's like saying "the faculty of a college is going on strike on Tuesday" and "the faculty have degrees from universities around the world."
    In the first sentence, the faculty acts as a single entity; in the second the faculty are a group of different individuals.
    But I agree that the OP sentence would make more sense if the author had used only singular or only plural verbs.
     
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