Academic Writing for International Students of Business

2 Structure

All passive structures have two parts:

2.9:Passives 125

Form of the verb to be Past participle

is constructed

was developed

will be reorganised

 Change the following into the passive.

(a) We collected the data and compared the two groups.

(b) I interviewed 120 people from six similar businesses.

(c) They checked the results and found several errors.

(d) We will make an analysis of the findings.

(e) He asked four managers to give their opinions.

(f) She wrote the report and distributed ten copies.

Using adverbs

An adverb can be inserted into a passive form to add information:

This process is commonly called ‘networking’.

 Change the following sentences from active to passive and insert a suitable adverb
from the box below. Decide if it is necessary to show a cause.

optimistically helpfully effectively accurately

eventually carefully profitably vigorously

Example: The recession forced half the companies to make redundancies.

Half the companies were eventuallyforced to make redundancies by

the recession.

(a) The Connors family ran the company until 2001.

(b) Economists debated the reasons for the Asian currency crisis.