Question

Change the following statement into active voice.
The telegraph wires have been cut.
A. Someone has been cut the telegraph wires.
B. No one has cut the telegraph wires.
C. The telegraph wires have cut someone.
D. Someone has cut the telegraph wires.

Answer 1

Hint: Passive voice is basically a grammatical voice construction where the object, which is also known as the argument, becomes the subject. In other words, passive voice displays the change that has occurred to the grammatical subject. In comparison with active voice, where the subject has the agent role. In grammar, the voice of a verb is defined as a tool to explain the connection between the action that the verb expresses, and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object and others).

Complete step by step answer:
1. In order to change a statement in active voice to passive voice, several things have to be carefully studied. Firstly, it is very important to identify the tense of the sentence. Then, the subject and the object should be identified. For example, in “The telegraph wires have been cut.”, the subject is not known. We don’t really know who has cut the telegraph wires. The object is ‘the telegraph wires’ and the tense of the sentence is ‘Present Perfect’.
2. Then, the positions of the subject and the object should be replaced. Since, the subject is not present here, we will use the word ‘someone’ for the subject. It will go to the place of the object ‘the telegraph wires’ and “the telegraph wires” will shift to the position of the subject, ‘someone’.
3. We know that past participle form of the main verb is always used in passive voice irrespective of the tense. But, in this sentence, the past participle of the verb ‘cut’ is same as its infinitive form. Therefore, we don’t need to change it.
4. In this sentence, we can see the phrase ‘have been cut’. Since, we are changing the voice of a sentence whose tense is ‘Present Perfect’, we will replace ‘have been’ with ‘has’. Rest all remains the same.
5. The sentence that we now get is “Someone has cut the telegraph wires”. This sentence matches correctly with the question sentence and this is the correct option.
6. In the first option, the positions of the subject and the object have not been interchanged, also the tense is not changed. This makes option A wrong.
7. When we are asked to change the voice of a sentence, we should always keep in mind to not fiddle with the meaning of the sentence. In “No one has cut the telegraph wires”, the meaning has been changed because of the addition of the word ‘No one’. Therefore, this statement is wrong.
8. In the third option, the positions of the subject and the object have not been interchanged which makes the option incorrect.


Thus, Option D is correct.

Note:
We can represent the action in a sentence using two ways, namely through active and passive voice. Active voice is characterized by the literature where the subject is doing the action (verb). But, in passive voice, the object becomes the subject. There are some rules that should be kept in mind while converting from active to passive and vice versa. The conversation is different for different kinds of sentences and also for different tenses as well.