Question

“You will have read the book by the time I return.’ Change this sentence into the passive voice.

Answer 1

Hint: To convert a sentence from the active voice to the passive voice, we must first interchange the positions of the subjective noun and the objective noun. Then we must change the verb into its past participle form

Complete answer:
To begin the conversion we must understand what tense of the given sentence is. The verb used here is the past participle form. Therefore, we need not change the form of the verb. The auxiliary verbs supporting the main verb are ‘will’ and ‘have’. The word ‘will’ indicates that the action is going to take place in the future. The word ‘have’ indicates that the sentence is in perfect tense.

Therefore, we must make sure that after interchanging the positions of the subjective and the objective noun, the sentence should still be in the future perfect tense.
- The word ‘you’ is the subject and the word ‘book’ is the object. On interchanging, we will get, “The book will have been read by you by the time I return.” This is the correct sentence.
- It will not be “The book will be read by you by the time I return”, because this sentence will be in the simple future tense which is incorrect.

Note: The passive voice is a literary device that is used to change the focus of the reader from one noun to another. For e.g. John wrote this letter. In this sentence, John is important as the writer of the letter. When we change it into the passive voice it becomes, This letter is written by John. In this case, the letter is the important part of the sentence.