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Use
We use the passive when we don’t know, or it isn’t important, who does the action. The
passive is much more frequently used in English than in Spanish, where we normally use
the third person plural or “se” when the subject is not specified.
Form
We form the passive with the correct tense of the verb “to be” + the past participle.
The following tenses do not have a passive form: Present perfect continuous, Past perfect
continuous, Future continuous and Future Perfect continuous, and, therefore, in the passive
we will use their simple forms.
Agent
The subject
Normally, the direct object in active sentence becomes the subject in the passive sentence:
However, in English, when there are direct and indirect objects in the active sentence, both
of them can be used as subjects in the passive sentence, though, generally, the indirect
object is preferred:
Infinitive constructions
In infinitive constructions, we can use a passive infinitive when the subject in the second
clause is not important:
Or we can also use impersonal expressions, such as: it is believed, it may be considered, it
was said, ...
In English, there are many verbs with prepositions or adverbs. When putting the sentences
into the passive voice, we must not forget the preposition or adverb.
We obviously can use the passive in relative sentences and we just have to be careful to do
it well