The Passive Voice

Why This Matters

Read these two sentences:

1. Someone stole my bike last night.
2. My bike was stolen last night.

Both are true. Both are correct English. But they feel different. The first one is about someone — some unknown person. The second one is about my bike — the thing you actually care about. You don’t know who the thief is, so why start the sentence with him? You start with the bike.

That second sentence is in the passive voice. And once you notice it, you will see it everywhere — in news reports (“Three people were injured”), on signboards (“Trespassers will be prosecuted”), in science (“Water is heated to 100°C”), and in exam instructions (“All questions must be answered”).

This unit goes with the stories about flying, where pilots are guided, planes are flown, and lessons are learned. The passive is one of the most useful tools in English. The good news: it follows one simple recipe. Learn that recipe once, and you can build the passive in any tense, for any sentence. This page teaches you that recipe step by step, and — just as importantly — it teaches you when and why to use it, so you sound natural and not like a robot.

The Big Idea

In an active sentence, the doer of the action comes first: Ravi ate the mango. In a passive sentence, the receiver of the action comes first: The mango was eaten. Same event, different focus. To make a sentence passive, you move the object to the front, change the verb to “be” + past participle, and push the old doer to the end as “by …” — where it is usually dropped because the doer doesn’t matter.

Before we go further, let’s get three small grammar words crystal clear, because the whole topic rests on them.

The passive only makes sense once you can spot the subject, verb and object in a sentence. Here is a quick refresher so you never get lost.

Let’s Break It Down

Active vs passive — what actually changes

Look again at our example. In active voice, the doer leads:

Ravi ate the mango. (doer → action → receiver)

In passive voice, the receiver leads:

The mango was eaten (by Ravi). (receiver → action → doer)

Nothing about the real-world event changed. Ravi still ate the mango. What changed is which part we put first — that is, what the sentence is about. The passive turns the spotlight away from the doer and onto the receiver. The picture below shows the three parts literally swapping places.

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So the passive is not a different meaning — it is a different camera angle on the same event.

Why we use the passive at all

Here is the question students rarely get answered: if active and passive mean the same thing, why does the passive even exist? Why not always say “Ravi ate the mango”?

The answer is that very often we cannot, or do not want to, put the doer first. Think about real life:

• Sometimes we don’t know the doer. My bike was stolen. You have no idea who the thief is — so you can’t start with him.
• Sometimes the doer is obvious. The thief was arrested. Of course the police arrested him; saying “by the police” adds nothing.
• Sometimes the doer doesn’t matter. The Taj Mahal was built in the 1600s. You care about the building, not the names of the workers.
• Sometimes we want to stress the receiver, to make it the star of the sentence. Penicillin was discovered by Fleming — the sentence is about penicillin, so penicillin comes first.

In every one of these cases, the active voice forces you to lead with a doer you can’t name, or don’t care about. The passive solves that perfectly: it lets the receiver lead and lets the doer step back or vanish. Figure 3.2 lays out these four reasons with an example for each.

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The 3-step swap: turning active into passive

Now the recipe. To turn any active sentence into a passive one, do these three things in order. Figure 3.5 sums up the whole recipe on one card.

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Let’s name each step clearly:

Step 1 — Object becomes the new subject

Find the object of the active sentence (the receiver) and move it to the front. In The chef cooks the food, the object is the food. So the passive will start: The food …

Step 2 — Verb becomes “be” + past participle

This is the heart of the passive, and it deserves a clear definition first.

The verb in a passive sentence is never a single word — it is always two parts joined together. Here is what “past participle” means.

So in Step 2 you replace the active verb with “be” + past participle. The “be” word is is / am / are / was / were / will be / has been … — and here is the crucial part: the “be” word carries the tense.

Why must it work this way? Because when the doer steps back, the sentence still has to say when the action happened. The action’s timing can’t disappear just because we moved the doer. So we give the timing its own little word — a form of “be” — and let the unchanging past participle carry the action. The “be” word handles when; the past participle handles what. Figure 3.4 shows this division of labour.

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Step 3 — Old subject becomes the “by …” agent (often dropped)

Finally, take the old subject (the doer) and move it to the end as “by …”. The doer at the end of a passive sentence is called the agent. In The chef cooks the food, the doer is the chef, so the agent is by the chef.

But here is the most natural thing about the passive: the “by …” agent is usually dropped. Why? Because, as we saw in Figure 3.2, the whole reason we chose the passive was that the doer was unknown, obvious, or unimportant. If the doer mattered, we would have used the active voice in the first place! So most real passive sentences have no “by …” at all:

• My bike was stolen. (not by some thief)
• The road is being repaired. (not by the workers)
• English is spoken here. (not by the people)

You only keep “by …” when the doer is genuinely interesting — like Penicillin was discovered by Fleming.

Let’s run the recipe on a fresh sentence.

The passive in each common tense

Because the “be” word carries the tense, the passive can appear in any tense — you just pick the right form of “be”. The past participle stays the same every single time. Study the table below carefully; it is the one you will come back to most.

Here is the full set of active and passive forms side by side, using the verb write a letter.

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The same information, written out so you can read it as a list:

Tense	Active	Passive
Present simple	writes a letter	a letter is written
Past simple	wrote a letter	a letter was written
Future simple	will write a letter	a letter will be written
Present continuous	is writing a letter	a letter is being written
Past continuous	was writing a letter	a letter was being written
Present perfect	has written a letter	a letter has been written
Past perfect	had written a letter	a letter had been written
Modal (must / can / should)	must write a letter	a letter must be written

Notice the pattern. Every passive is just (form of be) + written. To shift tense, you change only the “be” part:

• is written → was written → will be written.
• For continuous tenses, “be” becomes is being / was being.
• For perfect tenses, “be” becomes has been / had been.
• For modals (can, must, should, will), put be after the modal: can be written, must be written, should be written.

Let’s apply this to a continuous-tense sentence, which students find trickiest.

When we use the passive — and when the agent drops out

Let’s pull the “why” together into one clear habit, because the exam (and good writing) rewards it. Use the active voice by default — it is shorter and livelier. Switch to the passive when one of these is true:

• The doer is unknown → My phone was hacked.
• The doer is obvious → The match was cancelled. (by the organisers — obviously)
• The doer is unimportant → Rice is grown in this region.
• You want the receiver to be the star → The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
• You want to sound neutral or official → Smoking is not permitted here. (no need to blame a person)

And the matching rule for the agent: drop the “by …” unless the doer adds real information. In the first three cases above, keeping “by someone” would sound silly. In the last two, the doer is worth naming, so you keep it. A simple test: read the sentence with the “by …” removed. If it still says everything important, leave the agent out.

Common Mistakes

The passive trips up almost every student in the same few ways. Spot your own habit in the list below and fix it now.

When you change the tense, the first thing learners forget is to keep the original tense. Watch this trap.

The next trap is the most common of all: dropping the “be” word entirely and using only the past participle.

A subtler error is trying to make a verb passive when it has no object to promote.

Here is the term behind that last mistake, so you can test any verb yourself.

Finally, watch the agent — don’t bolt on “by …” when nobody needs it.

Quick Check

Test yourself before the practice set. Read each question, decide, then check the explanation.

Practice Problems

Try each one yourself first — write your answer down — then reveal the model answer. For every “change the voice” question, keep the original tense and drop the agent only if it adds nothing.

Easy

Medium

Challenge

Summary

You should now be able to explain each of these in your own words:

• Active vs passive: active leads with the doer (Ravi ate the mango); passive leads with the receiver (The mango was eaten). Same event, different focus.
• The 3-step swap: object → new subject; verb → “be” + past participle; old subject → “by …” agent (usually dropped).
• The “be” word carries the tense; the past participle never changes. To shift tense, change only the “be” word: is / was / will be / is being / has been …
• The passive across tenses: every form is just (form of be) + past participle. Continuous → being; perfect → been; modal → modal + be + past participle.
• When to use it: when the doer is unknown, obvious, or unimportant, or when you want the receiver to be the star — otherwise prefer the active.
• Drop the agent unless the doer adds real information; never write clumsy agents like “by somebody”.
• Only transitive verbs (verbs with an object) can be made passive. Intransitive verbs like sleep, arrive, laugh cannot.

What’s Next

You have seen that the passive depends completely on getting the tense right — the whole job of the “be” word is to carry the correct time. That makes the next unit the natural follow-on. Unit 4: Tenses takes the twelve tense forms one by one — simple, continuous and perfect, in past, present and future — and shows exactly when each is used. Once you are confident with tenses, building any passive sentence becomes automatic, because you’ll already know which form of “be” to reach for.