Review of the Passive Voice

The transformation of an active sentence into a passive sentence is a three-step process:
1. Move the object of the active sentence to subject position in the passive sentence.

2. Change the verb to passive form (two parts).

3. Move the subject of the active sentence to object position preceded by the preposition by (optional).

In order to change the active verb to its corresponding passive form, we need to do two things:

1. Put the verb to be in the same tense as the verb in the active sentence. In this example the verb is in the simple past, so we use the past tense of be.

2. Use the past participle of the verb in the active sentence.

The passive verb, therefore, has two parts.

a) The verb to be indicates the tense, and the b) past participle indicates the action.