collectives

 Deciding whether to treat nouns of multitude - words like majority, flock, variety, group, crowd, and so on - as singulars or plurals is entirely a matter of the sense you intend to convey. Although some authorities have tried to fix rules, such undertakings are almost always futile. On the whole, Americans lean to the singular and Britons to the plural, often in ways that would strike the other as absurd (compare the American "The couple was married in March" with the British "England are to play Hungary in their next match"). A common fault is to flounder about between singular and plural. Even Samuel Johnson stumbled when he wrote that he knew of no nation "that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability." Clearly the italicized words should be either singular both times or plural both times. See also number and total.