WBPSC Clerkship English: Active-Passive Voice Practice Quiz

The passive of the Present Continuous is ‘is/am/are + being + V3’: A song is being sung by her. ‘is sung’ is Simple Present, ‘was being sung’ is Past Continuous and ‘has been sung’ is Present Perfect, so none of them keeps the tense of the original.

The passive of the Present Perfect is ‘has/have been + V3’, so ‘My purse has been stolen.’ is correct. When the doer is vague (someone, people), the ‘by …’ phrase is dropped. ‘had been stolen’ is Past Perfect and ‘was stolen’ is Simple Past.

The passive of a Simple Past question starting with ‘Who’ is ‘By whom + was/were + object + V3?’, so ‘By whom was this novel written?’ is correct. ‘is written’ has the wrong tense, the second option does not put the helping verb before the subject, and ‘By who’ is wrong because a preposition takes the object form ‘whom’.

With a modal verb the passive is ‘modal + be + V3’, so ‘Your parents must be obeyed by you.’ is correct. After a modal only the base form ‘be’ can follow, never ‘been’ or ‘being’.

The passive of an imperative begins with ‘Let + object + be + V3’: Let the door be opened. ‘Let’ cannot be followed by a bare V3 or by ‘is’, and the last option turns the command into a plain statement.

Only a transitive verb with an object can be made passive. ‘rises’ is intransitive and has no object, so ‘The sun rises in the east.’ cannot be changed. The other three have the objects letter, football and window.

The passive of the Past Continuous is ‘was/were + being + V3’. The new subject ‘students’ is plural, so it is ‘were being taught’. The first option is Simple Past, the fourth is Past Perfect, and ‘was’ in the second does not agree with a plural subject.

The passive of a Simple Present negative is ‘am/is/are + not + V3’. When the object ‘me’ becomes the subject it turns into ‘I’, so ‘I am not helped by him.’ is correct. ‘was’ is Past, ‘am not being helped’ is Continuous, and ‘Me is’ is ungrammatical.

The passive of the Simple Future is ‘will be + V3’. The object ‘us’ becomes the subject ‘we’, and the doer ‘they’ becomes ‘by them’, so ‘We will be invited by them.’ is correct. ‘would’ is a different (conditional) form and does not match the tense.

Some verbs take a fixed preposition instead of ‘by’ in the passive. ‘interested’ is followed by ‘in’: I am interested in this subject. Similarly known to, surprised at, pleased with, covered with.

The passive of the Past Perfect is ‘had been + V3’: The cow had been sold by the farmer. The first option is Present Perfect, and ‘was been’ and ‘had being’ in the others are not valid forms.