Active and Passive Voice
About 6 min · English Comprehension · English
Time worked out from the lesson's 308 words at 150 words a minute, plus a minute for each question.
Voice in grammar determines whether the subject performs the action (active) or receives it (passive). The key skill tested is your ability to identify the subject, verb, and object, then reconstruct the sentence while maintaining tense and meaning.
Key ideas
- Active voice: The subject performs the action. Structure: Subject + Verb + Object. Example: "Ram writes a letter."
- Passive voice: The object becomes the grammatical subject and receives the action. Structure: Object + is/are/am/was/were/been/being + past participle + by + subject. Example: "A letter is written by Ram."
- The tense of the sentence must remain unchanged during conversion—only the voice changes. If active is present continuous, passive must also be present continuous.
- Not all sentences can be converted to passive. Intransitive verbs (verbs without objects) like "sleep," "happen," "rise" have no passive form.
- In passive voice, "by + agent" is optional when the doer is unknown, unimportant, or obvious from context. Example: "English is spoken here" (by people—understood).
Quick reference
- Active to passive: Object → Subject, Verb → be + V3, Subject → by + agent.
- Tense stays the same; only voice changes.
- Use "being" for all continuous tenses (except perfect continuous and future continuous—avoid passive).
- Imperatives start with "Let + object + be + V3."
- Interrogatives: Flip helping verb to start, keep "be + V3" structure.
Check yourself: 3 questions
1. Convert to passive voice: 'The teacher praised the student.'
2. Convert to passive voice: 'Someone has stolen my bicycle.'
3. Convert to active voice: 'The letter is being written by Sita.'
This lesson is cut from the topic's note, not rewritten. Fact-checked on 17 Oct 2026: an AI-assisted check of this note against cited sources; the errors it found were corrected that day. Some errors may remain. The questions are from Shishya's validated question bank.
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