The active and the passive form?

[nassima5282]

what is the active and the passive voice and when we used?
Merci d'avance

[Thomas]

If you haven't heard it yet, listen to Intermediate Lesson 002. But here are some of the differences:

example:
active: Peter ate the pizza.
passive: The pizza was eaten by Peter.

With the active voice, the subject does the action. In passive, the subject does not do the action. Instead, what comes after the word "by" does the action (though this is optional). Here's how you form it:

Peter ate the pizza
original subject + original verb (simple past) + object.

Take the object, change it to become the new subjet. Then add the verb "to be" in the same tense as the original verb (simple past in this case). So so far we have:

The pizza was

Next, you add the past participle of the original verb (ate --> to eat --> eaten), giving us:

The pizza was eaten

Now you have a choice. One of the differences is that whoever does the action (obviously, the pizza is not eating -- Peter is eating), called the agent, does not have to be specified with the passive voice. So if you want to say who did the action, the agent, you add the preposition "by" and then the agent. So your sentence can look like:

The pizza was eaten. (We do not know or did not specify who did the eating.)
The pizza was eaten by Peter. (Peter, though not the subject of the sentence, still does the action -- he is the agent.)

Hope that helps! Read over that and listen to intermediate 2, and if you have more questions, let me know