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Which of the following is correct?

  1. How much salt and pepper was added to the soup?

  2. How much salt and pepper were added to the soup?

In other words, should "salt and pepper" be followed by a singular or a plural verb? Please also explain why.

herisson
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jia103
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    @tchrist: Off-topic proofreading? There's a difference of a single word between the two sentences. – herisson Dec 28 '16 at 19:07
  • @sumelic That's correct: all "which one is right?" questions are offtopic proofreading. They don’t help anyone else and they should no effort. There might be an interesting question here, but work will need to be one on it first. – tchrist Dec 28 '16 at 19:09
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    @tchrist: 1. which particular word is in question: "was" or "were" 2. what might be wrong about it: the grammatical number (this was identified in the old title, and I moved this information to the body and tags). 3. why it might be wrong: this does have to be inferred, but it's obvious that the reason for uncertainty is the presence of the coordinating conjunction "and" connecting two singular noun phrases. – herisson Dec 28 '16 at 19:10
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    jia103, i decided to vote to close your question as a duplicate, but if you disagree with this decision you are still able to edit your post to explain why it's not a duplicate. Please notify me if you decide to do this by posting a comment below this answer that contains "@sumelic". – herisson Dec 28 '16 at 19:25
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    I'm not too happy with 'salt and pepper' being treated as a single enitity – I think two answers are required, so plural concord is necessary in this case. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 28 '16 at 20:29

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