The use of tenses in the Passive Voice

The uses of tenses in the Active and in the Passive Voice are the same.

INDEFINITE:	Present	New schools are builtevery year.
	Past	This school was builta month ago.
	Future	A new school will be builtin our village in spring.
PERFECT:	Present	The school has been builtthis month.
	Past	The school had been built by the 1st of September.
	Future	I am sure the school will have been builtby the 1st of September.
CONTINUOUS:	Present	A new school is being built in our street.
	Past	When I returned to town, the school wasstill being built.

All Forsytes have shells... in other words, they are never seen, or if seen

would not be recognized. (Galsworthy)

The news was brought that the little boy at the “Three Castles” was ill.

(Thackeray)

Further meetings will be held tonight and tomorrow night. (Daily Worker)

You have been told three times this week that she is coming home for a year

for her health. (Shaw)

I have been very unhappy since she died. I have been slighted and taught

nothing, and thrown upon myself, and put to work not fit for me. (Dickens)

By 12 o’clock a jury reasonably satisfactory to both sides had been chosen.

(Dreiser)

Don’t you disturb him. He is working at his wonderful poem. An immortal

work of art is being created. (Marryat)

When Mills got to the stables, a horse was being saddled. (Eliot)

To express an action going on at a definite moment in the future only the Future Continuous Active is possible. Thus the Russian sentence ‘Когда вы придете в лабораторию, опыт уже будет производиться’ must be translated in the following way:

When you come to the laboratory, we shall already be making the

experiment.

To denote an action which began before a definite moment in the present, past or future, and continued up to that moment, the Present, Past and Future Perfect Continuous Active are generally used.

Уже два часа как правят корректуру.

They have been reading the proofs for two hours.

Когда пришел главный редактор, корректуру правили уже два часа.

When the editor-in-chief came, they had been reading the proofs for two hours.

The Present Perfect Inclusive Passive and the Past Perfect Inclusive Passive are found with verbs not used in the Continuous form, in negative sentences and with some non-terminative verbs (see Chapter VII, Tenses, § 18, 21).

She has always been admired.

The dictionary has not been used for months.