What Are Passive Verbs?

Verbs are passive when the subject of a sentence has the action done to it, as oppose to the subject of the sentence doing the action, which would be an active verb.

Take this sentence as an example: "John ate the slice of pizza".

Currently, the verb is active, because the subject of the sentence did the action. It would be passive if the subject had the action done to it. In this situation, the subject is John. We can make the verb in this sentence passive by saying...

"The slice of pizza was eaten by John".

Here are a couple more examples of active verbs and how they can be turned into passive verbs...

Active: "Mark was eating an apple"
Passive: "The apple was being eaten by Mark"

Active: "Sue painted the picture"
Passive: "The picture was painted by Sue"