MY LANGUAGE SCHOOL

Generally speaking, the form of the Passive voice is:

Subject + auxiliary verb BE in all tenses and forms + past participle of the main verb

Examples:

Toyota cars are made in Japan.

My car is being serviced at the moment.

America was discovered in 1492.

My room was being painted when I arrived home.

 

On many occasions you will be asked to change a sentence from Active to Passive Voice. This is how you do it:

1. The object of the Active sentence becomes the subject of the Passive sentence.

2. The verb of the active sentence turns into Passive Voice by adding the auxiliary BE in the appropriate tense or form and the past participle of the verb.

3. The subject of the Active sentence becomes the Agent of the Passive sentence and is placed after the particle BY (quite often though it is omitted, since it isn’t really important unless we want to stress it; it is omitted in any case if the subject of the Active sentence is “someone”, “people” or “they”).