El/la before á nouns (and majority)

Hello,

In lesson 11.2, the sentence “The majority of positions for foreigners are in the field of teaching English.” is translated as “La mayoría de puestos para extranjeros es en la área de enseñar inglés.”

My understanding is that if a feminine noun starts with an accented ‘a', the definite article switches to “el”, like in “el agua”, “el aula” or even “el hambre”.  Shouldn't that be the case with “el área” also?

I also think that when you are talking about a majority of individual items in a group, you use the plural verb, like you would with “a lot of”, just as you do in English.  You would only use the singular if you were talking about the majority itself, not the items. ("The majority is a larger section of the population than one would expect.")

Since I'm not sure where else to report these, I have been putting them here.

Please let me know if I am misunderstanding something.

Thanks!
Peter

Hola Peter-nR,

Yes, it should be el área, it's an error. Not sure what you mean by the plural verb?

Saludos,

Ricardo

I think it should be son not es, because it's talking about the group of positions, not the majority itself.

Ahora entiendo y creo que tienes razón. 

Saludos,

Ricardo

¡Hola, Peter y Ricardo!

You're both right in saying that it should be el área and not la área for “the area,” since this word starts with a stressed a sound. Thank you very much for pointing this error out to us! I will pass this on to the Spanish team to get it sorted out. 

As for whether you should use a singular verb or a plural one when the subject of the sentence is la mayoría de [X] “the majority of [X],” you can in fact use either (most of the time)! Both versions are considered grammatically correct in Spanish, although you are likely to hear the plural more often. It's only if the verb is followed by something like an adjective that you really need to use a plural verb form, because the adjective will be in a plural form as well. For example, if you said something like La mayoría de las mujeres eran jóvenes “The majority of the women were young,” you would have to say eran “were,” not era “was”; otherwise, it would sound very strange with the plural adjective form, jóvenes “young.”

I hope that helps! Do let me know if you still have any questions.

Saludos,

Liss

Hola Liss,

Gracias, como siempre, tu respuesta es muy útil.

Saludos,

Ricardo