Passive Voice: Present and Past Simple
The passive voice flips the focus of a sentence from agent to action. The team reviews all reports (active) becomes All reports are reviewed (passive) — the action stays the same, but the doer either drops out or moves to a by-phrase. Form: am/is/are + past participle for the present simple passive, was/were + past participle for the past simple passive. The by + agent phrase is added only when the agent is important (The report was written by the research team); it’s omitted when the agent is unknown, unimportant, or obvious (The office is cleaned every evening).
This worksheet builds B1 control of the passive in present and past simple — and trains the with-agent / without-agent decision.
Worksheet preview
What’s inside:
- Grammar Box with form for both tenses and the with-agent / without-agent rule
- Active-to-passive transformation: rewrite sentences in the passive, dropping or keeping the by-phrase as appropriate
- Gap-fill with mixed-tense passive forms in workplace and news contexts
- Drop the agent decision task: decide whether the by-phrase adds information or should be omitted
- Full Answer Key plus Teacher Notes on the no-be error and the agent-decision criterion
Common mistakes addressed: dropping be (The report sent yesterday), wrong past participle (was sended), keeping the agent when it adds nothing (The office is cleaned by the cleaners every evening), and missing tense agreement (is announced yesterday).
For: Adult and teenage learners (14+) at CEFR B1, in intermediate classes, 1:1 lessons, or self-study. The basic passive is heavily tested in Cambridge B1 Preliminary (PET) and is foundational for the all-tenses passive in B2 First (FCE). Part of the Passive & Causative collection — the natural next step is Passive Voice: All Tenses, which extends the form across the full tense system.
