Passive Voice English Grammar

Watch the video here

https://youtu.be/NBbP_-dwhpk

Hello everyone and welcome back to English with Kathryn.

Today we're going to look at the passive voice

The passive voice is a favorite with academics.

So, if you're going to be sitting the IELTS, the Cambridge, theTOEFL examinations, then I recommend you learn this tense really well because the examiners absolutely love it, in both the speaking and the writing tasks.

As well as that, politicians use it a lot, the news, print and tv media use it a lot.

So, it's important to be able to recognize it, at least.

So, let's first explain the difference between the active voice and the passive voice.

By taking this sample sentence,

- The police arrested two bank robbers

Okay here,

ACTIVE VOICE

You have the subject (police), you have the verb (arrested) and then finally the object (two bank robbers)

That's a normal active sentence,where the subject is at the beginning.

PASSIVE VOICE

However in a passive sentence,

We have the object in the beginning (Two bank robbers) followed by the verb (were arrested) in the passive voice and then finally the subject (by the police).

But we don't always need the subject in the passive voice and I'll go through this a little bit later.

Now let's look at how we form the passive voice.

In the previous sentence,

Two bank robbers were arrested by the police.

We have were arrested.

We have the verb to be in the past simple in this case and as always the past participle.

So the passive voice is formed with the verb to be in either the past tense the present tense or the future tense and the past participle.

There's that pesky past participle again!

It's everywhere, it's in the perfect tenses, it's in lots of other areas.

So, you really really need to know the past participles.

Here is a link to the 200 most common irregular verbs and their past participles.

https://www.englishwithkathryn.com/downloads

At least you have a pdf, you can download and study the past participles.

Because the regular past participles just have an ‘ed ending’

Like the past simple, for example,

- look - looked

- watch - watched

And so on.

So, now we know how the passive is formed through the verb to be and the past participle.

Let's conjugate it.

Let's do it in all of the different tenses.

Now, I want you to participate here.

I'm going to give you the active sentence in each tense and I want you to guess the passive form of it.

So, after the active sentence, I want you to pause the video and try and write down or even think up in your head the answer.

The passive form of the sentence on the screen.

Okay!

Are you ready to give it a go?

Good.

Okay, first let's start with the present simple,

Let's take the sentence,

- Somebody steals my car

Somebody steals my car - and of course because the subject is at the beginning of the sentence, this is an active sentence.

Now, I want you to put it in the passive form,

Okay, how did you go?

Let's see the answer,

- My car is stolen by somebody

Did you get that right?

Okay.

Let's move on to the present continuous.

- Somebody is stealing my car

Again this is the active sentence,

I want you to pause the video and put the sentence in the passive.

Yeah

This one is a little bit trickier, right!

So let's see the answer.

So it's,

- My car is being stolen by somebody

So, we put the verb to be in the ‘ing’ form, the present continuous or progressive form and we have the past participle as well.

Okay, I hope you're getting the hang of it.

Now, let's try the past simple, which is probably one of the most common uses of the passive form.

Because they use it a lot in the news when something happened in the past.

So this one is very important.

- Somebody stole my car

Pause the screen and put this active sentence into the passive form.

Okay, how did you go?

As you know we need to put the verb to be into the past simple.

So let's do that,

Was - right?

- My car was stolen by somebody

Very very good.

Okay,

Another very common use of the passive is with the present perfect form.

So let's look at the active sentence,

- Somebody has stolen my car

Okay.

Can you put this in the passive form now?

Pause the screen.

Yes

- My car has been stolen

My car has, we need the has - it's the present perfect - has been stolen

So, we need to put the verb to be in the present perfect ‘has been’

And then we always need the past participle with the main verb.

We're going to skip the present perfect continuous because we don't really use this in the passive form.

So, we're going to go now to the past perfect.

PAST PERFECT

Very similar to the present perfect except we use had instead of has.

- Somebody had stolen my car

Pause the video and put this in the passive form.

Yes,

- My car had been stolen by someone

I think you're getting the hang of it now, I hope.

Okay,

Let's finish this section with two future tenses.

Let's start with will,

- Somebody will steal my car

Pause the screen and try and put this in the passive form.

- My car will be stolen by somebody

Well done, that's great.

FUTURE PERFECT

And the last one - the future perfect

- Somebody will have stolen my car

In the passive form,

We have,

- My car will have been stolen by somebody

Okay, it's not a tense that we would use very often in the passive form but it's definitely possible.

Okay, now we get to the juicy part.

When in god's name am I going to use this tense!

So, the first one,

- When we want the focus to change from the subject of the sentence to the object of the sentence

So, we're really concentrating on which is the real focus of the sentence.

- Shakespeare wrote Hamlet

In this sentence, because Shakespeare's first, we're really focused on the fact that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.

And we're not really focused on Hamlet as such

But if we swap it around and make it a passive sentence we put Hamlet first

- Hamlet was written by Shakespeare

And in this sentence because Hamlet is first, it's the main focus of the sentence.

Okay, the next obvious reason for using the passive form is when

- we don't care about who does the action,

- it's obvious who's doing the action

or

- we don't know who's doing the action

Let's take some examples,

- The road is being repaired

The road is being repaired by people who work on the road.

We don't really care who is repairing the roads, not in this sentence anyway.

So, we don't even need to put them in the sentence.

All we care about is that the road that is full of potholes is being repaired, that's the main thing.

Next one,

- The man was arrested

Okay

So, who normally does the arresting?

It's the police right, normally.

So, we don't even need to mention it here because it's obvious that the police arrested the man.

So we leave it out.

And this is something that we see very very often in the news when it's obvious who is doing the action.

And last but not least

- The car was stolen

So, we actually don't know who stole the car.

We could say by somebody, but we don't need to say this.

All we're concerned about is getting that car back. We don't really care who did it.

Okay

We also use the passive form in factual, scientific and academic writing and speaking.

- In 2001, thousands of people were killed on our national roads

So, we may not know who exactly killed each person.

We don't want to put this in the headline or in the statistics. So, we use the passive form instead.

- Our planet is surrounded by an ozone layer

Okay, we can put this in the active

- An ozone layer surrounds our planet

But, in factual writing and speaking I think it's more dramatic to use the passive form here.

It's really a preference and but you will often hear it in documentaries.

You'll hear people using the passive voice rather than the active voice, it just sounds more natural.

Okay

Let's take another sentence that would be better off in the passive.

So, this is an active sentence and I want you to put it in the passive form.

- People have been capturing animals and putting them in zoos for much of human history

So, this is an active sentence.

Now pause the screen, think about it for a bit and put it in the passive form.

- For much of human history, animals have been captured and put in zoos

That sounds better, don't you think?

Rather than using people - people is a bit redundant here.

We don't really need it.

1) because it's obvious that people are doing it.

And

2) it just adds extra words to the sentence.

We don't really need it.

Okay, I hope you got something out of that lesson.

I am going to put more active sentences in the description below and I want you to be able to put them in the passive.

So, you can write your answers in the comments and I'll take a look.

Good luck and see you for next grammar Tuesday :)

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