If you ever find that you have some spare time on your hands, I would really appreciate it, if you could give my pictorial course a ‘health check’ - particularly the phrases.
The section of my text book dealing with the partitive singular says that one of the most common situations where the partitive case is used is “after numerals more than one and after “monta” (many)”. For the particular example you have asked about, it explains that “when the numeral + noun combination is the subject of the sentence, the verb is in the singular”.
Kiitos–I knew I was getting too confident about Finnish. This puts me right back to a sense of incomprehension. The very logic of Subject and Verb agreeing in number couldn’t be expected to hold up. I can’t wait til I get to the plural partitive. At least I can watch “Teletubit” and understand the Finnish.