Question

Convert the given sentence into its passive voice.
Barby did not forget the hot chocolate cake.
(A) The hot chocolate cake was not forgotten by Barby.
(B) The hot chocolate cake did not forget by Barby.
(C) The hot chocolate cake was not forgot by Barby.
(D) None of the above

Answer 1

Hint: We can follow certain rules to change the given sentence to its passive form. Find out what the subject and object is and then just swap their places. Then remember to change the main verb into the past participle form or third form. After that, put ‘by’ before the subject. Here our subject is ‘Barby’ and the object is ‘hot chocolate cake’. The rest of the statement must be grammatically corrected.

Complete answer:
Read the ‘active sentence’ or given sentence, a few times and identify who the subject and object are;
Here ‘Barby’ serves as the subject and ‘hot chocolate cake’ serves as the object.

The first step for the conversion of any active statement to its passive form is to swap the places of the subject and object. When we say ‘swap’ their places, it means that we must make our object the subject (by replacing what was already the subject) and similarly, the subject will become the object (by replacing what the object was).

The next step for changing active to passive form is that; we need to take the verb that was there in the active form (sentence given in the question) and make the verb into the form of its past participle. The verb in the given question is ‘did not forget’; so here ‘did’ has to be converted to ‘was’ and the next part of the verb ‘forget’ should be converted into its past participle ‘forgotten’.

Now let us look at the given options:
Option (A) is correct since the subject and object have swapped places and the verb forms, ‘did’ became ‘was’ and ‘forget’ became ‘forgotten’ as per the requirement. So we can accept this option.
Option (B) is incorrect because even though the subject and object swapped places, no change is made to the verb ‘did’. Also ‘forget’ has not been converted into its past participle. So this sentence has not been changed according to the required rules, so it is a wrong option.
Option (C) is incorrect because here the subject, object and verb ‘did’ has been changed correctly but the part of the verb that is ‘forget’ has not been changed into the past participle, so we must reject this option.
Option (D) This is incorrect; since the answer cannot be ‘any of the above’ when we found one of the given options to be right.

Thus the correct answer is an option (A) i.e, The hot chocolate cake was not forgotten by Barby.

Note: We often tend to get confused between the past tense and past participle, because they both contain the word past in it. Past tense is normally a single word, where each verb has a past tense form and that is what is used to write the sentence in its past tense. Then there is another tense called the perfect tenses, take the past perfect tense, for example, it is made up of a helping verb and the past participle. To clear this out we can look at the following sentences;
- I had finished my work yesterday. (Here ‘had’ is the helping verb and ‘finished’ is the past participle)
- I finished practice at 9 yesterday. (Here ‘finished’ is in the past tense)