"The contents of the cereal box" — singular or plural? [duplicate]

Your confusion is understandable as your construction, "The contents", raises a semantic question:

Does a cereal box have "content" (the cereal), or "contents" (the grains of cereal)? I don't think that either of these is definitively right or wrong, but it changes how you write your sentence:

If the cereal box has "contents" (grains of cereal), then:

The contents of the cereal box are distributed among the children.

If the cereal box has "content" (cereal), then:

The content of the cereal box is distributed among the children.

In my opinion the second phrasing makes more sense, but that's just an opinion.