Complete the cleft construction with the most appropriate pronoun and verb agreement:
It was not the regional branch managers but the chief executive officer who ________ ultimately accountable for the corporate insolvency.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. was held
Answer: was held. Why not the others: 'were held' erroneously agrees with the plural negated subject 'branch managers' rather than the singular affirmative focus; 'are held' shifts into the present tense unnecessarily; 'being held' lacks a finite auxiliary verb and creates an incomplete sentence fragment.
- Step 1: Examine the focused element in the it-cleft structure: 'not the regional branch managers but the chief executive officer'. In correlative 'not X but Y' structures, the verb agrees with the element following 'but' (the singular 'chief executive officer').
- Step 2: Match the singular past tense framing established by the matrix clause 'It was': the relative pronoun 'who' refers to the singular noun phrase and takes the singular past passive verb 'was held'.
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