Was vs. were (not subjunctive)

[aj.simms]

Hi there. This is my first post. I had a brief look around the site yesterday and didn't find any existing threads that answered this question, but I apologise in advance if this topic has been covered already.

I work in a corporate training department and one of our courses teaches staff how to answer customer e-mails. We have a lot of examples in the course where we get them to choose correct words to complete a sentence (there/their/they're, its/it's, etc.). One of the examples is the following: "The most accurate version of all the results (was/were) faxed yesterday".

The textbook answer says "were" but it just sounds to me like it should agree with "version" which is singular, so should be "was". If it should be "were", presumably to agree with "all the results", should it then say "versions" instead?

[svartnik]

Hello


The most accurate version of all the results was faxed
There is only one most accurate.

[aj.simms]

Thanks. That's what I thought. It was difficult bringing it up with the creator of the course material, but I felt as the whole purpose of the course is to teach correct language usage, we should take extra care to make sure the course material is correct!

[MrPedantic]

I would agree with Svartnik; though I find it difficult to imagine a context in which you could use the example sentence!

MrP