The passive

• In an active sentence, the subject of the sentence is the ‘doer’ who performs the action of the verb. In a passive sentence, the object of the active verb becomes the subject. We use the passive only with verbs that take an object. Compare:

	Subject	Action	Object
Active	He	has painted	the house.
Passive	The	house has been painted.

• We use the passive when:

– we want to focus on the action, not the doer of the action: The house has beenpainted. It looks great!

– the doer is not known or not important: Oh no! My bag’s been stolen! (= I don’t know who stole it.) This house was built in 1970. (= Somebody built it. It’s not important who.)

– the doer is obvious or ‘people in general’: He was arrested. (Obviously, the police arrested him.) The show is watched all over the world.

• If we want to mention the doer of the action, we use by + agent (= the person/thing that does the action): I was hit by a car.

• The passive is more common in writing than speech.

• We form the passive with an appropriate form of be + past participle.

Circle the correct answer.

0 Very little knows /(is known)about this disease because it is very rare.

1 The government has spent / has been spent a huge amount of money on education.

2 Traffic on the M₁₁ is very slow this week as repairs are carrying out / are being carried out on two lanes.

3 The shopkeeper chased the thieves for a few minutes, but then they disappeared / were disappeared into the crowd.

4 ‘I’ve done a lot of work for them, but they haven’t paid / haven’t been paid me,’ an electrician complained.

5 The shopping centre is going to knock down / is going to be knocked down.

6 ‘We should inform / be informed about the dangers to our health,’ a factory worker said.

7 Representatives from sixty-five countries will attend / will be attended the conference.

8 The missing boy has not found/has not been foundyet.