Active and Passive Voice

Active and Passive Voice

🟢 Lite — Quick Review (1h–1d)

Rapid summary for last-minute revision before your exam.

Active voice places the doer in the subject slot: Subject + Verb + Object (e.g. The chef prepared the soup). Passive voice promotes the receiver to subject slot and demotes the doer, using a form of the auxiliary be + past participle (V3): The soup was prepared (by the chef). Only transitive verbs (verbs that take a direct object — eat, write, build, kick, send) can be made passive; intransitive verbs (happen, arrive, sleep, die) cannot. The verb be must agree in number and tense with the new subject. High-yield NABTEB pointers: (1) Memorise the V3 of irregular verbs because spelling changes are tested (written, taken, given, stolen); (2) identify the object of the active sentence first, then shift it to subject position; (3) modal passives (can be done, must be sent, should be read) appear almost every year in the objective section.

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🟡 Standard — Regular Study (2d–2mo)

Standard content for students with a few days to months.

Core Structural Rule

Transformation from active to passive follows a fixed sequence: (1) find the object of the active verb, (2) make that object the new subject of the passive sentence, (3) insert an appropriate form of be as an auxiliary, (4) use the past participle (V3) of the main verb, (5) optionally introduce the original doer with by.

Tense-by-Tense Pattern

Tense in Active	Active Form	Passive Form (V3)
Simple Present	cooks	am/is/are cooked
Simple Past	cooked	was/were cooked
Present Perfect	has cooked	has/have been cooked
Future	will cook	will be cooked
Modals	can cook	can be cooked

Ditransitive Verbs

Verbs that take two objects (give, send, tell, teach, show, offer, pay) yield two grammatically correct passives. Active: The principal gave the students certificates. → Passive 1: The students were given certificates by the principal. Passive 2: Certificates were given to the students by the principal. The indirect-object version (students were given…) is usually more natural.

Stative vs Actional Passive

The stative passive (The door is closed) describes a resulting state with no implied action, while the actional passive (The door is being closed by the janitor) emphasises an ongoing event. Both are grammatically passive but answer different questions.

Typical NABTEB Question Patterns

• Sentence rewriting: “Change the following sentences from active to passive voice” — five items, 5 marks.
• Multiple choice: selecting the correct passive form of an underlined active verb.
• Error identification: spotting misuse of V2 instead of V3, or wrong be form.
• Fill-in-the-gap: supplying was/were/has been + V3 in context.

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🔴 Extended — Deep Study (3mo+)

Comprehensive coverage for students on a longer study timeline.

Edge Cases and Restrictions

Intransitive verbs (happen, occur, rise, die, sleep) cannot take a passive because they have no object to promote: The accident happened ❌ The accident was happened. Linking verbs (be, seem, become) also resist passivisation. Prepositional passives arise when a preposition + object cluster becomes the subject: Active: People speak English all over the world. → Passive: English is spoken all over the world.

Agent Omission

The by-agent is omitted when the doer is unknown (My phone was stolen), unimportant (Rice is grown in Asia), obvious from context (The criminal was arrested), or when the writer’s focus is the action rather than the actor — a convention common in scientific, legal, and journalistic writing.

Common Exam Traps

• V2/V3 confusion in irregular verbs: was wrote ❌ → was written ✅; was took ❌ → was taken ✅.
• Number disagreement: The results is announced ❌ → The results are announced ✅.
• Tense slippage: The food is cooked yesterday ❌ → The food was cooked yesterday ✅.
• Modals without be: should repair ❌ → should be repaired ✅.
• Stative–actional confusion in get-passives (get + V3), acceptable in informal writing but rarely tested in NABTEB.

Practice Prompts

1. Rewrite: The committee has approved the new curriculum. (target: Present Perfect Passive, mention the agent).
2. Rewrite: Someone must submit the forms before Friday. (target: Modal Passive, agentless).
3. Identify and correct the error: The match were won by the home team. (target: number agreement with singular match → was).

Connection to Adjacent Topics

Mastery here feeds directly into reported speech (passive reporting verbs like is said to…, is believed to…) and conditional sentences (If the letter were sent today…). NABTEB Paper II (Essay & Objective) tests voice transformation roughly twice a year, so consistent drilling of the V3 column of irregular verbs is the single highest-leverage habit for this topic.

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