The passive is the voice of reporting, science, and news — the English you meet in textbooks and write in assignments. At B1 you need it in two tenses.
What you can do after this lesson
You can turn an active sentence into the passive when the action matters more than the actor, and you can recognise the passive instantly when reading.
The lesson
Form: be + past participle. The object of the active sentence moves to the front.
- Present: Coffee is grown in the Highlands.
- Past: The bridge was built in 1975.
Use the passive when:
- The doer is unknown: My phone was stolen.
- The doer is obvious or unimportant: English is spoken in class. (Obviously by people.)
- The process is the point — lab reports, descriptions: The samples were dried and weighed.
Keep the doer only when it adds information, using by: The novel was written by a PNG author.
Examples
| Active | Passive | Why prefer the passive? |
|---|---|---|
| Someone cleans the labs daily. | The labs are cleaned daily. | Doer unimportant |
| They cancelled the lecture. | The lecture was cancelled. | News style — event first |
| Farmers harvest the coffee in May. | The coffee is harvested in May. | Process description |
Common mistakes
- ✗ The report was wrote yesterday. → ✓ The report was written yesterday. (Past participle, not past simple.)
- ✗ My bag stolen. → ✓ My bag was stolen. (Never drop be.)
- Overuse. If the doer matters — The students organised the fundraiser — the active is stronger. Passive everywhere makes writing heavy.
Self-check — what can I do now?
Rewrite in the passive, keeping the tense:
- People speak Tok Pisin across PNG. (Tok Pisin is spoken across PNG.)
- The university awarded 400 degrees last year. (400 degrees were awarded last year.)
- Find one passive sentence in any news article today and identify why the writer chose it.