the audience was amazed, ___________?

[spica]

there's been a huge debate among teachers in my language centre regarding the appropriate tag question for

The audience was amazed, __________?

personally, i think the answer should be

weren't they?

.

what do you think?
some teachers said it's supposed to be "wasn't it" or "wasn't he."
i guess we really need some help here, and if you could also please post your reference, it would be much more helpful.

thanks..^^

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by spica

there's been a huge debate among teachers in my language centre regarding the appropriate tag question for

personally, i think the answer should be .

what do you think?
some teachers said it's supposed to be "wasn't it" or "wasn't he."
i guess we really need some help here, and if you could also please post your reference, it would be much more helpful.

thanks..^^

Hello Spica.

I'd say that for most people, 'audience' is a singular entity.

Results 1 - 10 of about 833,000 English pages for "audience were".

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,810,000 English pages for "audience was".

In the sentence you gave,

The audience was amazed, __________?,

it stands as a singular taking the singular verb 'was'. Even if 'audience' sometimes has a plural notion for some, wouldn't you say that in this case it makes sense that it matches, so,

The audience was amazed, wasn't it?