English Grammar Drills

14
The Passive
In most sentences, the subject of the sentence is also the agent or performer of the action of the
verb. For example, consider the following sentence:
Mary answered the phone.
The subject, Mary, is also the agent, the person who performs the action of answering the phone.
Sometimes, however, we want to use sentences in which the subject is not the agent. For
example, consider the following sentence:
Mary was promoted last week.
Mary is still the nominal subject (the verb was is in the third-person singular to agree with the
singular noun Mary), but Mary is not the agent. In other words, Mary is not the person doing
the promoting. Instead, she is the recipient of the action of the verb promote. She did not promote
anyone; somebody promoted her. Accordingly, the sentence is a passive sentence.
Passive sentences in English have a unique grammatical structure: they must contain what
we will call the passive helping verb be. There are actually two different helping verbs that use be
in some form: one that is used to form the progressive, and one that is used to form the passive.
How can we tell them apart? The answer is by looking at the form of the verb that immediately
follows the helping verb be. Compare the following sentences:
Progressive:
Passive:
present
participle
be verb
We were cleaning out the garage yesterday.
past
participle
be verb
The garage was cleaned out yesterday.
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