English · Chapter 6 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
The passive voice
How English puts the spotlight on what happened rather than who did it - 'the bread is made here' - with the verb 'be' plus a past participle.
The short version
The tense lives in be, never in the participle
Every passive is a form of be plus a past participle, and the participle never changes. To build any passive, ask two questions: what tense do I need, and what is the past participle of the main verb. Forgetting the be is the single most common passive error, and the work done yesterday is not a sentence.
The office is being cleaned right now.
Verbs with no object have no passive
Only transitive verbs can go passive, because the object is what becomes the new subject. Happen, arrive, sleep, fall and die describe something the subject does on its own, so there is nothing to promote. If you cannot answer the question what after the verb, the verb has no passive at all.
An accident happened.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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