THE PASSIVE

UNIT 19

Passive vs Active Sentence

The president asked the employees to speak English. (active)

The employees were asked to speak English. (passive)

***A passive sentence and an active sentence have similar meanings,

***but the focus of the sentence is different.

***In the PASSIVE sentence, the focus in on the action, the person, or the thing receiving the action.

In ACTIVE sentences, the agent (the doer of the action) is

in the subject position

People spoke English at the meeting. (active)

AgentObject

English was spoken by people at the meeting

Passive/object

agent

The agent not always necessary

English was spoken at the meeting. (We assume people were doing the speaking.)

***Use the by + agent phrase is the agent is important or if the meaning of the sentence would be unclear without it.

The internet is dominated by English.

The Internet is dominated. (By who or what?)

Tense Active Passive Question Form

Present Simple They repairs cars. The cars are repaired.

Are the cars repaired?

Present Progressive They are repairing car.

The cars are being repaired.

Are the cars being repaired?

Simple Past They repaired cars. Cars were repaired. Were the cars being repaired?

Past Progressive They were repairing cars.

Cars were being repaired.

Were cars being repaired?

Present Perfect They have repaired cars.

Cars have been repaired.

Have cars been repaired?

Past Perfect They had repaired cars.

Cars had been repaired.

Had cars been repaired?

***The passive forms of Present Perfect Progressive and Past Perfect Progressive are not common.

Transitive vs Intransitive

Transitive verbs are the ones that take an object and they can be used in the passive.

Someone saw her at the conference.(Active)

She was seen at the conference.(passive)

Intransitive verbs are the ones that do not take an object and they cannot be used in the passive.

I feel asleep. (Only active)

TRANSITIVE

Call, concern, do, expect, find, give know, leave, lose, make, put, see, take, use

INTRANSITIVE

Include, appear, arrive, come, die, fall, go, happen, live, look, occur, sit, smile, stay, wait, walk

***Born is the past form of bear. Born is used almost exclusively in the passive.

I was born in a small town.

Passive Forms with Direct and Indirect Object

Some verbs, such as give, offer, show, and tell can have two objects: a direct and indirect objects.

The team gave the manager the report.

indirect direct obj

The manager was given the report by the team.

The report was given to the manager by the team.

Reasons for using the passive***Describe a process or a result. First, the information was studied. Then recommendations were made. Therefore, English was made the official language of the company in 2010.

***Use passive when you don’t know who performed the action.The report was poorly written.

***Use it to report news events.Recommendations for the teaching of languages were published today.

PASSIVE 2

Tense Active Passive Question

Be going to They are going to repair cars.

Cars are going to be repaired.

Are cars going to be repaired?

Will They will repair cars

Cars will be repaired.

Will cars be repaired?

Modals(Modal+ be + V3)

They can repair cars.

They have to repair cars.

Cars can be repaired.

Cars have to be repaired.

Can cars be repaired?

Do cars have to be repaired?

GET PASSIVEo For get passive, use GET + V3

The storm destroyed the crops(Active)The crops got destroyed(Passive)

o For negative, use don’t/doesn’t get + V3

The crops don’t get destroyed.The crops didn’t get destroyed.

o For question;Do the crops get destroyed?Did the crops get destroyed?

Using get passiveo We use get passive to talk about negative situations or

situations we think are beyond our control.

Some food companies are getting fined for using unsafe equipment.

She got arrested and charged with murder.

o The get passive is more common in speaking.