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User: Language: en
Title: How English Works - 9 - Passive Voice
Caption: hi everyone my name is Ben and you&#39;re watching another episode of how English Works in this series my goal is to show you things about how English works these are not your typical grammar lessons we don&#39;t do any drills there&#39;s no charts and there&#39;s definitely no memorization the goal is to help you better understand the things that we say in English and what they mean so let&#39;s get into today&#39;s topic which is the passive voice which is a phrase that you might have heard before but what is it and how does it change the meaning of the language so let&#39;s start with this first word passive what is passive mean passive is something that is happening in the background right it&#39;s not the opposite is active right so active um that&#39;s an that&#39;s an i and then passive let&#39;s do passive in blue so something that is active is somebody doing something right I am taking action I am doing a thing I am being active right active action same route passive is the opposite when you&#39;re not really doing an action you&#39;re waiting right and so somebody who&#39;s being active might say all right how can I help I can do this let me help you something that&#39;s being passive somebody that&#39;s being passive might be waiting in the the background waiting for somebody to tell them okay you should help by doing this or something like that um we also talk sometimes about passive income you might have heard that phrase before passive income is something that you don&#39;t do actively that still generates income that still makes you money so for example owning a business that you don&#39;t work at if you if you own a business that you don&#39;t work at that is generating passive money because you&#39;re not doing anything right active income is just a job you&#39;re actively doing work to make money so that&#39;s the that&#39;s the important distinction here um the word a voice is just a kind sort of a not super important word for this the actual key to understanding the passive voice is this this key word so let&#39;s look at an active sentence first um because that those are usually more common they&#39;re clearer right so I um record videos right I record videos this is an active sentence I am doing something I am doing a thing right I&#39;m I so this is the person that&#39;s doing the the the the sentence the subject is doing a thing I&#39;m recording videos right that&#39;s an active sentence I play football I go to school anything that has a a subject like that a person or a thing that is doing an action is an active sentence and it feels stronger right I I record videos I do things it&#39;s a strong sentence a passive sentence is sort of the other way around so you might find something like this videos are recorded right so there we go this is a passive sentence videos are the thing that are being recorded you don&#39;t know who is doing something right so the actual thing that is happening is just being right um and this is the inactive part of it there&#39;s no actual action you&#39;re just being something right um a similar thing you might see which isn&#39;t really the same as like I am happy this is not the same thing this is just a this is a different kind of sentence right there&#39;s not really an action there you&#39;re you&#39;re describing something about yourself um but it&#39;s similar right you can see there&#39;s a similar construction right I am happy videos are recorded has a similar Vibe right um but there they are a little different since this is an an action right it&#39;s it&#39;s describing a thing that was done to the videos versus this is a a state of being right um so like video the videos are done for example um is not passive because it&#39;s a it&#39;s explaining like a state as just a normal thing that feels very normal videos or this would be the videos right would make more sense the videos are done I might say to my boss hey boss the videos are done perfect right that&#39;s a good sentence that that is not really active or passive it&#39;s sort of just as a statement but passive sentence feel more passive right and go figure that&#39;s the name um and so if somebody says um for example um let&#39;s see what&#39;s a good example um I can&#39;t think of an example I got to come up with something okay uh like work was done right work was done um this is uh that&#39;s this is a bad example cuz it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s similar to this up here this one is uh this cuz done in this case is the is the adjective it is done it&#39;s a done thing this is the um the uh verb right so it&#39;s describing this thing so work was um let&#39;s do continued that&#39;s better work was continued continued work was continued that&#39;s a little that&#39;s that&#39;s even more passive and it&#39;s passive because we don&#39;t know really who&#39;s doing work right work was just continued that&#39;s sort of just a boring general statement that&#39;s not very helpful um and so this is why the passive voice can be kind of hard to use well because if you use it like this it&#39;s not very useful to like giving information right you don&#39;t learn anything about who did the work what kind of work was done right was it fast or slow there&#39;s just a lot of stuff missing and that&#39;s why it feels really passive right work was done work was uh the work was continued but it&#39;s a it&#39;s sort of a way of of avoiding saying something right because probably the work is not done right work was continued but there was no progress made for example but an active version was like um I continued working on it right that gives you more examp more information that you know who is continuing the work um and in this case you&#39;re assuming that they know what it is right but this is just not helpful right it&#39;s it&#39;s avoiding that active action of of saying what happened right and that is one of the the big problems of the passive voice is that it is not only a little bit boring right you kind of miss out on information but it&#39;s also like it&#39;s it&#39;s as if you&#39;re avoiding saying something right so let&#39;s get rid of all this let&#39;s look at some other examples um a oh like another great use or another not really great a common use of it is like to avoid responsibility right so you might might see some something in the news right shots were fired right shots were fired that means that somebody shot but you don&#39;t know who who shot the shots right who fired the shots um this is just saying that it happened it&#39;s a statement of fact that shots were fired um and so this can be either to hide information right was it the police who shot uh uh who fired shots was it was it criminals criminals was it uh a gang right who who was it we don&#39;t know who it was and so if they&#39;re trying to hide information or conceal information that&#39;s an in that&#39;s a possible way to do it right just to say shots were fired right or um something was done right whatever it might be however it&#39;s not always just a hide information it can also be used as um like a way to say a general statement right in this case right so it&#39;s a very general thing right so um for like if you&#39;re like in the past you might talk about something in the in the what the 60s movies were shot in black and white it&#39;s black white that actually would mean between but whatever um in the in the 60s movies were shot in black and white that is also passive right the movies didn&#39;t shoot themselves they were shot by some other person but since you&#39;re talking in general there&#39;s no reason just to say they shot movies in black and white you could say that that that is an active version of that sentence right they shot movies in black and white but the problem is that they also doesn&#39;t have information right let&#39;s make this in blue they also is not saying who&#39;s they there&#39;s so there&#39;s it&#39;s two options either you say they that doesn&#39;t mean much or you say the passive which also doesn&#39;t have that extra meaning because you&#39;re talking about a general time frame in the 1960s movies were shot in black and white that&#39;s totally normal that&#39;s totally fine for making a passive statement because you&#39;re talking in general right the the the difficulty or problem that people come into is when they use uh the passive voice to kind of EX to not have good information in a way that is unclear right so that example of like work was continued or English was learned is is so unhelpful that it&#39;s that it is not very it&#39;s it&#39;s just it&#39;s not a good thing to say because you&#39;re intentionally hiding information I guess but then it&#39;s also a very normal thing to use when you&#39;re talking in this very general sense of something was done by lots of people it doesn&#39;t matter who it was the thing is more important I think that&#39;s that&#39;s the um takeaway that I want you to have from this is that the passive voice is putting the the focus onto the thing not onto the person right so let&#39;s let&#39;s look at one final example um that we can we can um finish with let&#39;s see um let&#39;s see dinner was cooked dinner was cooked um but then my dad cooked that&#39;s CED that&#39;s not a word cooked dinner right there&#39;s the same meaning here right General meaning there is a dinner which is finished right it has been cooked but the focus here is on dinner and the focus here is on my dad right and so if the person that did the thing matters you want it to be inactive but if the thing is way more important like to the point that the the person that did it is not important then you might want to try considering a passive sentence right just make sure that you&#39;re not using it to hide information that would be useful or make that decision maybe maybe it is useful right you might also see it in stories where they they sort of want to hide who did it right the door was closed slowly as he entered who&#39;s he I don&#39;t know right but um yeah that&#39;s the passive voice I hope that you found this helpful I hope that this helps you understand the different feeling that it that it creates when you read something in the passive voice or hear something in the passive voice and hopefully it demystifies a little bit the the name passive voice and why it&#39;s called that but that&#39;s everything for this episode of how English works if you enjoyed it make sure to leave a comment below and let me know what else you&#39;d like to know about how English works and I&#39;ll make an episode on that in the future but that&#39;s it for me today I&#39;ll see you in the next episode bye
Description: Hi! My name is Ben. These videos and this channel are for all English learners interested in improving. 

In this series, we learn about English grammar differently than usual. There are no charts, no memorization, no confusing rules with millions of exceptions. Instead, we look at interesting aspects of English and how you can understand them. Don't worry if you fully understand. Notice these while you're immersing in English, and it'll all make sense with time.

To get access to the transcript for this (and all) video, visit the channel blog at https://www.benslanguagelab.com/how-english-works-9/. Or, enable the Subtitles.

I work for a language company called Refold (https://refold.link/benslanguagelab).
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