Question

Fill in the blanks with the most appropriate words.
All the business letters _____ yesterday. They ____ to the post office immediately.
A. Answered/ take
B. Were answered / took
C. Are answered/ were taken
D. Answered/ took
E. Were answered/ were taken

Answer 1

Hint:As the statement suggests, the option needs to be answered in the past tense. The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in past time.
In Languages which have a past tense, it thus provides a grammatical means of indicating that the event being referred to took place in the past.
Choose the option accordingly.

Complete answer:
Options A and D are the incorrect options because they are in the form of active voice. The sentence requires the verbs to be in the passive form because in the given sentence, the subject (business letters) is being acted upon. Therefore, Option A and D are not correct.

Option B is incorrect because the second part of the option is not in the passive form which is required by the sentence.

Option C is incorrect because 'are answered' is not in the past tense. Hence , it is an inappropriate option.

Option E is the correct answer because it is the past tense as required by the sentence. The sentence needs to be in the past tense as it is describing something that took place on the previous day. Therefore, Option E is absolutely correct.

Hence the correct answer is option ‘E’.

Note::To identify the passive voice, look at what happened and look at who was responsible for doing it. If the person or thing responsible for doing the actions is either omitted or occurs in the sentence AFTER the thing that happened, AND if you see a past participle straight after the form of “to be,” it's passive voice.
The passive voice is used when we want to focus attention on the person or thing affected by the action. Normally, the performer of the action, or the agent, comes first and is made the subject of the verb and then we use the active form of the verb. The other person or thing is made the object of the verb.