Chapter 8 - Passive Voice

How to Make a Passive Sentence?

A passive sentence has this structure:

Subject + BE (is/am/are/was/were) + Past Participle (Verb III) + by . . .

Examples:

If we don’t know or don’t want to say who does the action, we can remove "by..."

Example: "The room is cleaned (every day)."

When Do We Use Passive Voice?

We use passive voice when:

1. The person doing the action is not important or unknown.

For example: "The bank was robbed last night." (We don’t know who did it.)

2. The focus is on the action, not the person.

For example: "English is spoken in many countries." (We care about English, not who speaks it.)

3. In formal writing (news, science, history).

For example: "The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell."

Passive Voice in Different Tenses