In this topic, you will study a new structure called passive voice which is used to emphasize the result of an action. It will help you to reflect on the importance of historical events. You will read a brief history of the women’s right to vote in the USA and the UK, and you will also learn some interesting facts about women’s fight for their political rights in Latin America.
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By the end of this lesson, you will:
Use passive voice to describe past events. Focusing on who or what receives an action instead of who or what performs it.
Remember, we use the simple past to express an action that happened once or repeatedly in the past.
When you describe an event in the past, you might want to emphasize different aspects of the same situation depending on what you consider to be more critical. Look at the following picture:
If you think the agent (the doer of the action) is more important than the object of the verb (the receiver of the action). Maybe because you want to make someone responsible for something, then the agent becomes the subject of the sentence. This is called active voice.
But if you think the object of the verb (the receiver of the action) is more important than the agent (the doer of the action), then the object becomes the subject of the sentence. This is called passive voice.
To form the passive voice in past you need: the proper past form of the auxiliary verb to be; and the past participle of the main verb.
The object of the active sentence becomes the subject of the passive sentence. Compare:
| Active Voice | ||
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Verb | Object |
| My Friend | Invited | Me to a party |
| Christopher Columbus | discovered | America |
| Passive Voice | ||
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Verb | |
| I | Was invited | To a party |
| America | was discovered | By Christopher Columbus |
Sometimes a verb has two objects.
example:
My friends gave me a surprise.
In this example, we have two objects me and a surprise. You can change this sentence into the passive in two different ways.
I was given a surprise / a surprise was given to me.
I was invited to a party.
America was discovered by Christopher Columbus.
Activity 1
When we describe historical events, we use the passive voice to emphasize the importance of action.
You will read the history of the woman suffrage movement in the USA. You will identify how passive voice is being used to highlight key points in this movement. After reading the text, you have to complete the information with the correct event.
Activity 2
You just read how women in the USA got the right to vote but, what happened in the rest of the world? Do you know when women were allowed to vote in your own country?
Listen to an excerpt from a lecture on the women movement in Latin America then select True or False for the following statements.
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Activity 3
Now you have a better idea of how women got the right to vote in the USA and Latin America. Let’s take a closer look at the women’s movement in Mexico.
Download and read about the struggle for women’s right to vote in Mexico.
Instruction. After you read the text, record yourself describing at least four critical features of the movement in your own words using passive voice.
Check the rubricS before you submit your recording to make sure it meets the criteria.
Listen to the following example:
Activity 4
The ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution changed the world in a significant way. Some other events have had a similar impact.
Before you write your post, check the rubric to make sure it meets the criteria.
You can visit this website to get some ideas: http://www.ranker.com/list/most-important-historical-events-of-the-20th-century/mwahahahaha
Follow the following example:
Two atomic bombs were detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The two atomic bombs killed more than 120000 people.
These two bombs introduced the use of nuclear weapons.
Sometimes, fairy tales resulted from the hardships lived in specific periods in history. Such is the case of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl”. This touching story makes us re-evaluate our lives as well as those things we cherish most.
Read the following extract of this fairy tale. Then fill in the gaps with the past perfect simple of the verbs in the box below.
