🏗️ Grammar B1-24: Passive voice: simple

The passive is taught here as a spotlight move, not a paradigm: the thing the sentence cares about steps to the front, and the doer steps back or leaves. The opening scene is Yusra’s stolen bike — a sentence with no thief in it, because none is known — and a swap diagram shows the object of the active sentence walking to the front of the passive one. The form section builds both tenses on one engine, be + past participle, with a full table of statements, negatives, questions and short answers, then separates the participle from the past simple with an irregular-verb table: stolen, not stole; eaten, not ate. The four-question decision list teaches WHY, not just how — is the doer unknown, obvious, unimportant, or the story? — and three worked runs include one where the passive loses: Jana repaired my laptop, because the doer is the headline. The compare-and-verdict pair puts one fact in both voices — Shakespeare wrote the play / The play was written by Shakespeare — and ties the choice to the page each sentence belongs on, with by + agent spent like money. A 110-word school-news report about a station mural makes every voice decision tappable, including two by-phrases that earned their place and two verbs kept active on purpose. Practice runs to thirty-one explained multiple-choice items, several of which are won by the active voice; a twelve-phrase sorter separates by-phrases worth keeping from dead weight; six repairs and three traps target the be-less passive, the past simple after be, and the everything-passive essay. Teacher notes give a 45-minute sequence, the torch board move, the no-verb rescue, and Cambridge B1 Preliminary relevance.