This is New York in Slow English.
Today we're going to talk about how to use the passive voice in English.
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Now, the passive voice is not a tense.
It's not a verb tense.
It's a point of view.
It's a way of looking at a piece of action.
So, the passive voice can happen in any tense.
In English we generally expect a sentence to follow the pattern subject + verb + object.
But sometimes we turn it around, and we make the object the subject.
In a typical English sentence, the subject is the thing that is doing the action.
And the object is the thing that has the action done to it.
In a passive sentence, then, the subject is the thing to which action happens.
When somebody selects this sort of atypical point of view, they are doing it for a very
specific reason.
They're trying to communicate something to you.
There are generally 3 reasons why somebody might do this.
First is because they want to put more emphasis on the object rather than on the subject of
a typical sentence.
So, they make the object the very first thing that we're talking about.
It's the thing that we want to focus on in the sentence.
A second reason for selecting this particular point of view is when we don't really know
who's doing the action.
And a final reason for selecting this point of view is when we don't really want to say
who did the action.
Let's look at some examples and see if we can figure out exactly what's going on with
this interesting point of view.
Last week I went to Colorado to visit my daughter.
And while I was there, I went to Rocky Mountain National Park.
Even though it's May, it's still very wintery there, and the road was closed because of
all the snow.
Wow.
Looks like the road is close.
The road is always closed in the winter.
They close the road pretty much from October till June.
So we have some very good examples here.
We got to the sign, and it said "road closed".
Clearly here, the word "closed" is being used as an adjective.
I said, "The road was closed because of the snow."
Now in this case, it's a little bit unclear.
Am I talking in the passive voice?
Or, am I really just talking about an adjective?
In my mind, I'm just using "closed" as an adjective.
This is not really a passive voice sentence.
When I say, "Wow.
Looks like the road is closed", I'm definitely using "closed" as an adjective here.
This is not really a passive voice sentence.
My husband answers me, and I think that he is now slipping into the passive voice.
He's actually talking about an action of closing the road.
Somebody is doing it.
When he says, "The road is always closed in the winter", what I heard him say is that
somebody closes the road every winter.
Who is it?
It's the National Park Service.
He makes it very clear in the next sentence that that's exactly what he means.
He turns this passive voice point of view into a more typical English sentence with
a subject, verb, object.
Does it really matter if it's an adjective or if it's the passive voice?
Honestly, it doesn't really matter that much.
Except, it does change a very subtle, elemental part of the meaning.
If you look at my sentence, I'm just describing the road.
It's closed.
If you look at my husband's sentence, his has a little bit more meaning to it, right?
Because he's talking about the verb here.
He's talking about an action that has happened to the road.
There's a little bit more meaning buried in his sentence than in my sentence.
Even though grammatically they look very, very similar.
Looks like the road is still being scraped for snow.
Let's look at how we construct this interesting point of view.
We start with some form of the verb "to be", and follow it with a past participle, which
is often made from the main part of a verb plus -ed.
Though as you probably know, there are lots and lots of irregular verbs that you need
to memorize.
Your clue to the tense that we talking about is in the form of the verb "to be".
So, in this case, the form is in the present continuous tense - "is being".
It means that it's happening right now.
This is followed by the past participle "scraped".
All the hiking trails were buried by the snow.
So we decided to just hike the road instead.
In this example, you can see we're talking about the past tense, right?.
Because the form of the verb "to be" is in the past tense.
It's followed by the past participle "buried".
Notice the spelling on this.
We drop the "y" and add "-ied".
Often in this kind of point of view we add the agent that's doing the action by using
the word "by".
In this case it's "by the snow".
The snow is the thing that did it.
In a typical sentence in English where we use subject, verb, object, the snow would
actually be the subject.
The snow buried the hiking trails.
Subject, verb, object.
We walked for about 5 miles climbing steadily up into the mountains, and in all that time
we only saw one other person.
This road makes for an amazing hiking trail.
Yeah, it's not very steep.
It was graded for cars.
Here's a case where it's a passive voice for sure.
But what is actually doing the action here?
Is it the cars?
Did the cars grade the road?
No.
He selected this point of view because he doesn't know who graded the road.
It's just it was graded.
By somebody.
We don't know who.
We're almost to the tree line up here.
There's a lot of damage out here from the beetle that bites into these trees.
Look at those trees.
They've been chewed on.
This sentence is a passive voice sentence.
Even though he doesn't mention who is doing the action, we can guess from his sentence
before.
He's talking about the beetles, right?
The beetles have chewed on the trees.
These are the high mountains of Colorado, and this reminds of the Donner Pass, and the
story of the guys in the 1800's who tried to make it through here.
It was a small party of people.
They were coming up through the pass and a snowstorm came in, and they were stranded
in the middle of the pass over the mountains.
This sentence feels more like maybe this is an adjective.
They were stranded - it's describing the people who were caught on top of the mountain.
But, I suppose you could make an argument that the snowstorm stranded them, in which
case, the meaning is slightly different.
The got horribly snowed in.
Whenever you see the word "got" instead of the verb "to be" used in a passive sentence, you
can be certain that this is action.
"Got" indicates action.
You can be certain that it's a passive voice construction.
In this case we can tell from his context that he means that a terrible storm came and
snowed them in.
Subject, verb, object.
Yeah, I guess their survival skills were really tested.
Why would I select the passive voice in this sentence?
It's because I really want you to focus on the subject being their survival skills.
That's the most important thing to me in this sentence.
So that's why I selected it.
And, in the end, didn't they have to do something really extreme?
In the end, it is said that they ate each other.
"It is said" is used almost like an idiomatic expression.
We use this whenever we really don't know who said something, but we want to make it
clear that everybody says it.
That we don't really know where this came from, but everybody says it, as if it's a
fact.
We definitely have some snow up here.
Hey!
It's great out here!
The sun's out, and we're rewarded for our efforts.
This is another almost idiomatic expression when we want to say, I don't know who's rewarding
us.
I don't know, is it the sun?
Is it God?
Is it the Universe?
Is it fate?
I don't know.
We took this little trail, which luckily had been broken by somebody in front of us.
Here's a perfect example of the passive voice.
I wanted you to really focus on the trail, and not focus on the person who has broken
it in front of us, because I don't really know who that person is.
Do you know this meaning of the verb "break"?
"Break trail" is when you are hiking somewhere, and the trail is either covered with a lot
of vegetation or a lot of bushes and trees, or it's covered with snow.
And somebody has gone in front of you and either made big footprints in the snow, or
they've cut down some of the vegetation so that it's easier for you to walk through it.
It was named Trail Ridge by the Park, and was formed from the narrow footpaths that the Ute
Indians left behind.
If I had just said, "It was named Trail Ridge", then I would think of "named" as really an
adjective.
But in this case since I added the agent, it's in the passive voice point of view.
You can see that the further we walked along this road, the deeper the snow got.
These very high walls were carved out of the snow by the snowplows ahead of us.
I love my new boots.
Can you imagine?
Only moccasins were worn by the Indians.
This is interesting what he does here.
He first says, "I love my new boots."
Subject, verb, object.
I love my boots.
But in the next sentence he talks about "moccasins were worn by the Indians".
He turns it around into a passive voice.
Why does he do this?
It's because he wants to move the conversation, he wants to move the focus to really be directed
on the footwear.
On to the moccasins.
I can see them working on the road up ahead.
I wonder if the road will be opened by June when all the tourists start to come back.
In this sentence you can notice how I moved into the future tense using the passive voice.
And again, this is the same discussion we had earlier about "closed".
In this case, "opened".
By using the past participle it's very clear that I'm not talking about an adjective here.
I'm talking about a verb.
Meaning, when is the Park going to open, when will they open the road?
Just before where the snowplows were working, we ran into this very nice man who had run
all the way up to the top of the mountain.
You went a lot further than we did.
So, what did you see up there?
Yeah.
So, I went up to Rock Cut, just on the downward side from Rock Cut.
And there's huge snowblowers up there that are clearing off the road.
So, there's probably a good 15-20 feet of snow beyond there that they're trying to clear
off.
You could look down and see that the road is being plowed.
This is very definitely the passive voice.
But why did he select it here?
I think he selected it because he really wanted us to focus on the road part.
On the fact that there's 15-20 feet of snow on the road up ahead of us.
And that he didn't really want us to focus on the big, giant snowblowers, which he had
already mentioned.
Alright.
See you later.
Take care.
Have fun.
We knew that soon the road ahead of us would be blocked by snow.
So, we turned around at this sign and headed home.
You can also use the passive voice with modals.
In this case, I use the word "would" plus "be" plus the past participle.
I hope this lesson cleared up some confusion around passive voice.
It's a very interesting piece of grammar.
It's something that you want to use deliberately when you're trying to clarify your meaning
by either focusing on the object, focusing on the thing that is receiving action or when
you want to say you don't really know who did the action.
Or if you want to say I don't really want to say who did the action.
Be sure to check out Part 2 of this video coming out next week.
I'll see you next time on New York in Slow English.