"Your 1 hour 6 minutes are up" / "Your 1 hour 6 minutes is up" [duplicate]

Solution 1:

According to Mary Nell Sorensen, instructor for the University of Washington International and English Language Programs, a set of rules on agreement are set out nicely here. (And for a wider range of helpful charts, look here.)

According to this chart, there are two rules that are applicable. The first one is specific:

Plural unit words of distance, money, and time. take a singular verb

Examples:

300 miles is a long ways to go on a bicycle. (distance)

Two hundred dollars seems a lot to spend on a dress. (money)

Fifteen years is a long time to spend in jail. (time)

And a more general rule for compound subjects would be this:

Subjects joined by and are nearly always plural

Exception: If the parts of the subject are considered a unit, you may treat the subject as singular.

Thus, for your compound subject of a unit of time (X hours and Y minutes), it should be considered to be singular.

Solution 2:

For your specific examples -- except for the 1st one -- both the singular and the plural verb versions are acceptable. It depends on the speaker's/writer's intent.

When the subject is a type of measure phrase (which your examples are), then a singular override is usually optional.

Often the verb will be singular, since subjects that are a type of measure phrase are often treated as notionally singular by the speaker/writer. But the verb can be plural if the subject measure phrase is being treated notionally plural.

But, when a measure phrase is subject, be aware that the singular override is obligatory when the predicative complement is a singular noun phrase. E.g. "Twenty dollars seems a ridiculous amount to pay to go to the movies".

Reference: page 504, "Measure phrases", in the 2002 reference grammar by Huddleston and Pullum et al., The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

ASIDE: There's nothing wrong with the constructions of your examples, so use them if you like them. :)