Hey! What's up! And welcome to Series English!
My name is Antonia Romaker and let's devote our today's class to differentiating active and passive.
Do you know the difference? A lot of my students confuse these, especially as to
formulating the structures, the sentences.
First of all let's try to understand the difference in meaning.
Active. Here the subject is active, it is doing something,
it did something, it will do something.
Anyway it is active. And it is in a state.
I am tired.
He will be worried about you. And things like that.
Passive - here the subject is passive, it is usually not doing anything.
Something is done to it, it is under the influence of something.
For example, a book was written or an article was published.
The book and the article were not doing anything, they were just lying there, relaxing... Joking!
Anyway passive, not doing anything, something is done to you, you are passive.
Now let's take a look at the examples here.
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in the 16th century.
Here Shakespeare is the subject of the sentence.
And this playwright wrote the play, he wrote Romeo and Juliet.
He was active, he did it himself, that's why here we deal with the active voice
The second example: Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare in the 16th century.
The meaning is very close but here 'Romeo and Juliet' is the subject.
And this play was passive, it did not do anything, it was written by somebody else, by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is active in this sentence.
Usually in a passive sentence the doer is identified by the preposition by.
Something is done by somebody.
In addition in passive the doer is not usually important,
and this information - the doer, the actor can be omitted, left out. And we can simply say:
Romeo and Juliet was written in the 16th century.
It doesn't matter who wrote this play we just need to know when it was written, that's it.
So the doer is not important the focus is changed,
if we compare this sentence to the active one.
So passive voice, the formula.
Here it is. It is the most common structure and the overall formula.
We use the auxiliary verb be and the past participle.
That is the verb with the ending ed, like worked, liked, smoked, loved, hated
or we use the third form of the irregular verb, like wrote, ment, set put and so on.
This formula will help you a lot do not underestimate it especially if you are a mathematician.
Anyway what do we do? We take the axillary verb be and put it in the necessary tense form.
As for this part here we deal with the full verb or the meaningful verb,
the verb, which contains the meaning within the sentence.
So we do not change it, we always use a past participle form of the full verb.
As for the auxiliary verb be, we put it in the necessary tense form.
Let's practice a little bit, let's take present simple.
In present simple the verb be has the forms: am, is or are.
So we choose one of these and then use the past participle form of the full verb.
You are invited to our party. You are invited. Invited is a past participle of the full verb invite.
You are invited to our party. Here the focus is changed.
It doesn't matter that we invited you, it is you who matter, you are invited to our party!
Now let's take a look at present continuous. Once again we take the verb be in the present continuous form
and the past participle. So we take be, we put it in present continuous
and we get - am, is or are plus being, the ing form of the verb to be.
Are we being followed right now? No, we are not!
The article is being translated. Is being translated
Use the formula, it is all very logical.
Let's take past perfect - had been... had been is the past perfect form of the verb to be.
And we use the past participle of the full verb.
An important discovery had been made.
The overall formula still works here, we use be in the necessary tense form, here past perfect,
plus the past participle.
Notice that perfect continuous forms are usually avoided, instead better use active than passive
with perfect continuous forms.
Since passive would be too complicated, there will be too many auxiliary verbs.
And finally do not forget that passive can be used with modal verbs thus we can use the following structures.
A modal verb plus be and the past participle, a modal verb plus be being and the past participle,
it is a continuous form,
and a modal verb plus have been and a past participle, this form is usually used for the past with modal verbs.
The payment can be canceled. The payment is not doing anything, it is passive.
She can't still be being interviewed. So I think it's impossible that someone is still interviewing her.
But she is important here, the interviewer is not important,
and that's why we use passive.
She can't still be being interviewed.
He didn't have any money on him, he must have been robbed.
We are talking about the past.
Also do not forget that we do not use passive with intransitive verbs.
For example, she died. We can't use passive here - she was died... no! She was killed - yes.
But to kill is a transitive verb.
When there's an object, when something is done to something else,
to kill someone - that is a transitive verb, to read something - that is a transitive verb.
Anyway that's it for today, I hope that this class was useful for you.
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Anyway that's it, hope to see you soon! Happy English and Russian practice! Bye!