How are active and passive voice made and differences between them?

Answer 1

A sentence may have a subject, a verb and an object.

ACTIVE

Here is an example of a sentence in the active voice:

* "The fox (subject) ate (verb) the chicken (object)."

The subject of the verb is doing something, is active, so this sentence is in the 'active' voice.

The action is by the subject, ----> upon the object.

PASSIVE

But if we focus on the chicken, and make the chicken the subject of the sentence, e.g.

* "The chicken was eaten by the fox."

....we see that the chicken, the subject, was not doing anything, it was passive in the matter (well, probably not!) in relationship to the verb. The subject, the chicken, was not doing or causing the action, but is/was affected by it.

The subject <------ was the recipient of the object's attention/actions!

This is an example of the 'passive' form of the verb in a 'passive voice' sentence structure. The subject was passivein the action of the verb.

NOTICE how the form of the verb changes to make the passive form.

The passive form of the verb is normally constructed by using the verb 'to be' + the past participle of the verb.

COMPARING the following 'active/passive' pairs of sentences will help you to see the differences between the two forms:

# ACTIVE: John Carpenter built this house.

# PASSIVE: This house was (past simple of 'to be') built by John Carpenter.

# ACTIVE: Early morning birdsong woke the baby. # PASSIVE: The baby was (past simple of 'to be')woken (past participle of 'to wake') by early morning birdsong. There are various rules for the different passive verb forms for different tenses and sentence structures. However, the above brief notes provide the basic and fundamental differences between 'active' and 'passive' forms. * For more information, see 'Related links' below.