Passive Voice

1) Definitions:
- Consider the following two sentences:

(a) The teacher explains the lesson.
Subject verb object
(b) The lesson is explained by the teacher.
Subject verb agent

- The sentence (a) is in the active form because the subject (the teacher) is the doer of the action.
- The sentence (b) is in the passive voice because the subject (the lesson) is not the doer of the action but undergoes the action.

2) When to use the passive voice?:
* We use the passive voice:
- when it is more interesting to stress one thing done rather than its doer.
e.g. This monument was built in 1964.
- or when the doer is unknown.
e.g. My wallet has been stolen.

3) Rules of transformation:
a)- When we turn a sentence from the active to the passive voice, the object of the active becomes the subject of the passive, and the subject of the active becomes the agent of the passive introduced by “by”.
b)- In order to find the form of the verb of the passive, we conjugate the auxiliary to be in the tense of the verb of the active and we follow it by the past participle of the verb of the active voice:

Tense of the Verb	Active Form	Passive Form
Present Simple	take / takes	am/is/are taken
Present Continuous	am/is/are taken	am/is/are being taken
Present Perfect	has/have taken	has/have been taken
Past Simple	took	was/were taken
Past Continuous	was/were taken	was/were being taken
Past Perfect	had taken	had been taken
Future Simple	will/shall take	will/shall be taken
Conditional	would/should take	would/should be taken

c) -Verbs which have two objects can be made passive in two ways.
e.g. They handed me a note.
- 1^st way: It is the first object of the active (“me”) which we make the subject of the passive:
I was handed a note.
- 2^nd way: It is the second object of the active which we make the subject of the passive:
A note was handed to me.