grammatical number - Conjugation of answer to "How much money is there?"

I'm using a website - www.ixl.com - to teach my child how to count American coins, amongst other activities. The site also has many questions on English grammar.

One thing that doesn't seem right - and perhaps I'm missing something here - is their conjugation of the response to "How much money is there?"

Here is an example of what I'm referring to:

I've never encountered the question where there's only a single penny (1¢) displayed. Thus there are always several cents. I would have thought that the answer should be conjugated with the plural conjugation.

Is the correct answer to "How much money is there?" (in the case of the three 1¢ coins and the 5¢ coin shown in the image) "There are eight cents."? Or am I missing something?

EDITED: There might be a previous question on this site whose answer would be applicable to this OP's question, but neither of those two threads cited to mark this OP's thread as a "duplicate" has an answer for the OP's question: the 1st "duplicate" thread discusses "A total of X" and its number when it is a subject, the 2nd thread involves a possible subject-dependent inversion with a measurement phrase with a sentence beginning with "Here". This OP's specific question deals with numerous topics, and its sentence also involves a leading "There", which ends up making the issue even more involved. Please get the duplicate mark off this thread so I can give the OP an answer. -- F.E.