B2 First · Grammar · Pattern 1 of 10
Every tense, the modal passive, 'be made to do' and 'it is said that' — the structure Part 4 returns to most often.
1 of 8
Someone stole my bike from outside the library.
WAS
My bike outside the library.
A passive transformation asks you to keep the meaning while changing who the sentence is about. 'Someone stole my bike' and 'My bike was stolen' report the same event; the second one simply drops the person nobody knows anything about. Part 4 uses the passive because it tests three things in one gap: the right form of 'be' for the tense, the past participle of the main verb, and whether you notice that the agent has to go — or has to come back after 'by'.
The tense is carried entirely by 'be'. Present continuous becomes 'is being built', present perfect becomes 'has been watered', a modal becomes 'must be handed in'. The participle never changes; only the 'be' in front of it does. If you can conjugate 'be' in every tense, you can write every passive in the language.
The lost mark is nearly always a dropped word, not a wrong one. 'Being' vanishes from continuous passives ('is built' for 'is being built'), and 'to' vanishes from 'be made to do' — the active 'made us stay' has no 'to', so candidates leave it out of the passive too. The examiner is counting words: two to five, including the key word. A missing 'to' is a missing word.
The other regular loss is the reporting passive. 'People say that the castle is haunted' becomes 'The castle is said to be haunted' — the reporting verb goes passive and the verb after it turns into a to-infinitive. Candidates who write 'is said that it is' have the idea and lose the mark on the grammar.
Find the object of the first sentence; it is the subject of the second. Then ask what tense the first sentence is in and write that tense of 'be'. Then add the participle. Only then decide about the agent: if the first sentence says 'someone', 'they' or 'people', it goes; if it names a real person and the second sentence has room for 'by', it stays.
Read your answer back inside the whole second sentence. Every accepted answer in the drill below fits its gap grammatically as well as in meaning — if your version needs an extra word after the gap to make sense, it is not the answer.
Only when it carries no information. 'Someone', 'they', 'people' and 'nobody' disappear because the passive exists to avoid naming them. A named agent — 'a famous architect' — comes back after 'by', and the key word will usually be BY when that is what the examiner wants.
'Make' and 'let' take a bare infinitive in the active ('made us stay') but 'make' takes a to-infinitive in the passive ('we were made to stay'). 'Let' has no passive at all — it is reported with 'be allowed to'. Part 4 tests both, and 'to' is the word that decides the mark.
