The Passive

Stage 2 : Exercise

The Passive

The passive is used to focus on or emphasize the object of a sentence. In English, this is done by bringing the object to the beginning of a sentence and making appropriate changes to the form of the verb phrase. The passive makes information sound more objective and impersonal, since the human element which so often occupies sentence-initial position is now moved to a different position or disappears completely. For example:

I sold the car Active

becomes:

The car was sold Passive

You would only include …by me in the sentence above in response to the question:

Who was the car sold by ?

Because the passive objectifies information and sometimes ‘hides’ the identity of the person responsible for an action, it is frequently used in the description of experiments and research reports, where the identity of the person responsible for the action is deliberately hidden or is unimportant.

The passive can also help to keep known information (information which has already been mentioned) at the beginning of a sentence. This is important because English prefers to put known information at the beginning of a sentence or clause to avoid introducing new information too suddenly and emphatically. Look at how this is done in the two sentences below where assignment is mentioned for the first time in the first sentence and so is already known (and can be represented by a pronoun) in the second sentence:

Active

I
known

left my

assignment
new

in the classroom.

Passive

Unfortunately,

it
known

was picked up by

another student.
new

Click for the exercises.
Exercise 1
Exercise 2