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Which one of the following two sentences is the correct sentence?

  • "20% of the participants believe that the world is flat."
  • "20% of the participants believes that the world is flat."

What grammatical rules govern the choice of the correct sentence here?

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20% of the participants believes/believe that the world is flat

The noun "percent" (or just %) belongs with the number-transparent nouns like "lot" and "number", where the number of the whole noun phrase depends not on the head, but on the number of the noun that is complement to the preposition "of".

In this case, the complement of "of" is the plural noun "participants", so the NP requires the plural verb "believe".

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