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Broken: ready.gov sign
After such weighty issues in recent posts, here's something trivial to get your knickers in a bunch.
I saw the sign at right in my neck of the woods recently. Such a nicely designed sign (and an important message) with a glaring grammatical error! It should be "never reopens" instead of "never reopen."
Right?
Yep, it's modifying a singular noun. You're correct. Maybe the government should close and reopen... with higher quality marketing.
Yes and no. This is a conflict between "notional" and "formal" agreement of number. Formally, "one" is singular and takes a singular verb form. Notionally (i.e., conceptually), not only is the verb in proximity to a plural noun ("businesses"), but the sentence is talking about a lot of businesses. If it had said "twenty five percent of businesses", you probably wouldn't have noticed the verb form, because either would be acceptable.
I highly recommend the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage for clarifying issues like this.
Broken, because they could have easily rewritten it to avoid such an untidy verb/noun agreement issue.
25% of businesses don't reopen after a natural disaster
1 in 4 businesses stay closed after a natural disaster
1 in 4 businesses DIE because of natural disaster (okay, over the top, but you get my point)
3 of 4 sentences communicate even after a grammatical disaster.
This sign has bigger problems than verb agreement... The "at least" at the very beginning renders the statistic virtually meaningless. It's especially grating as "at least one," since that makes the singular/plural issue feel unclear, even if it isn't.
It would be better restructured like this:
AFTER A DISASTER...
at least 1 out of 4
businesses will
NEVER REOPEN
Note that "will" serves both singular and plural, also sounds stronger. Also note that having some lines in all caps and others in lower case makes it more readable and fits the words better on the lines. Moving "AFTER A DISASTER" to the beginning creates a greater dramatic impact. Putting "NEVER REOPEN" at the end gives it more punch.
Janet's right, it's correct as written (and the word "will" should not be there, either.)
The subject of the sentence ("at least one in four") is plural, not singular. It would only be singular if there were only four businesses to start with... it in fact refers to hundreds of businesses, not one.
"Will" would be an inappropriate addition because the whole point of the advert is that 1/4 is the historical norm -- they're trying to change that statistic. So you don't want to make it predictive by adding that word.