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Passive Discovered Sentence Past America Discover Voice Focus

Question America ________________(to discover) in 1492.
A was discovered
B is discovered
C discovered
D discovers
Answer a
Remark The passive voice is used when the focus is on the action and the main topic of the sentence isn’t who did the action. We use the passive voice to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action.In the test sentence ‘America ________________ (to discover) in 1492.’ we show interest in America that experienced its discovery, the focus is on America’s discovery and not on the person who discoveredAmerica. In English we tend to put the most important thing at the start of the sentence.We make the passive using ‘be’ (in a suitable tense) + the past participle: be + done. The passive can be used with all tenses - the form of ‘be’ changes. We use passive forms of tenses in the same way as we use their active equivalents.America’s discovery is the fact of the past and in the test sentence the exact year is given when that event happened – 1492 – long ago, that means that we should use the past simple in this sentence. Therefore,we choose ANSWER 1 – ‘was discovered’.

Tags: passive_voice

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