"Which exams is he taking?" or "Which exams are he taking?" [duplicate]

There is a set of exams (e.g. SAT subject tests, AP exams, etc.), and a (male) student is necessarily taking more than one of those exams. My friend knows which ones he's taking, so I'm asking him which ones. Which sentence is correct?

"Which exams is he taking?"

or

"Which exams are he taking?"

Both sound weird to me, especially the second (even though I believe that is technically the correct one).

I would appreciate if somebody could help tag this question properly.

Solution 1:

In order to decide which of the two sentences is correct, you need to understand the syntax:

• the subject is he,
• the object is which exams,
• the main verb is take combined with the auxiliary be.

The number of the verb depends on the number of the subject. Since the subject is singular ("he"), the verb is also singular.

So one may say, "He is taking exams in two subjects this year." And the correct form of the question would be, "Which exams is he taking?"

Solution 2:

A good trick when dealing with the grammar of questions is to consider what the answer may look like.

The answer to the question...

Which exams (is/are) he taking?

is along the lines of...

He (is/are) taking these exams.

The word order in the question is inverted, but otherwise the grammatical structure is the same, with the object changing from "which exams" to "these exams".

In both cases the subject of the sentence is "he", and in both cases the correct form of the verb is the third-person singular, "is".