Passive Voice: All Tenses
The passive voice runs across the full English tense system on a single rule: the auxiliary be changes to match the tense, and the past participle stays the same. The cars are produced here (present simple), A new office is being built (present continuous), The results were announced (past simple), The plan had been approved (past perfect), The report will be published (future simple), The form must be submitted (modal). Mastery at B2 means moving fluidly across all tenses — particularly in formal written contexts like news articles, reports, and academic writing, where the passive is the default voice.
This worksheet builds B2 comprehensive passive control through extended news-article gap-fill in three different domains.
Worksheet preview
What’s inside:
- Grammar Box with a full tense-by-tense table (active vs passive) covering all major tense forms
- News-article gap-fill: three articles (data breach, regional acquisition, infrastructure overhaul) requiring mixed-tense passive forms
- Modal-passive items: complete sentences using must be, should be, will be, can be + past participle
- Active-to-passive rewriting across perfect, continuous, and modal forms
- Full Answer Key plus Teacher Notes on news-article register and the passive’s role in formal English
Common mistakes addressed: wrong auxiliary form across tenses (is been built instead of is being built), dropping been in the perfect passive (has approved instead of has been approved), and mixing active and passive in the same complex sentence.
For: Adult and teenage learners (14+) at CEFR B2, in upper-intermediate classes, 1:1 lessons, or self-study. All-tenses passive is the single most-tested transformation type in Cambridge B2 First (FCE) Reading-Use of English. Part of the Passive & Causative collection — the natural next step is Causative Have / Get Something Done, which adds the “arrange for someone to do it” structure to the passive toolkit.
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