Passive Voice

There are only two things wrong with these sentences (which have nothing to do with the passive voice).

In sentence 1, you want to use the participle for located. The sentence should read "the typhoon is located south of Hong Kong."

In sentence #3, the invention of gunpowder happened a long time ago-- it needs to be past tense. This would read "Gunpowder was invented in China, where it is used for fireworks".

The crazy fear of the passive tense is because of a widely discredited grammar guide called "Strunk and White". You could change these all to active tense... but most of us Americans, including English teachers, would think that was silly.

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How about sentence 2?

Your mobile was stolen... makes more grammatical sense to me. And the active voice is best when you want to convey action. Your choice, but here is an example:

The birds were eating the strawberries... (passive)
The orioles ate the strawberries... (active)

Don't you mean:
The strawberries were eaten by the birds.

"My mobile is stolen, so I couldn't contact you"
This is incorrect from a logical point of view, and because of a tense mismatch. (It reads as though you are in possession of a stolen phone.)

3.Should be
Gunpowder was invented in China, where it was used for (the first) fireworks.

There is nothing grammatically wrong with #2; "my mobile is stolen" states that the phone is in the state of stolenness . The use is much the same as "my finger is broken"; "my watch is damaged"; "my divorce is finalized".

The reason that it likely is causing some concern, maybe for an ESL teacher or it's given in a grammar exercise book as a questionable use, is that it just isn't as common in use as would be,

"My mobile has/had been stolen, so ... ."

There are, in English, some past participle [ed/en] and present participle [ing] adjectives that aren't commonly used. Instead we seem to opt for a verb form description.

I think that the most likely use here would be the simple past, "was stolen".

That said, both the past perfect, "had been stolen" and the present perfect 'has been stolen" would also work.

"My mobile is stolen, so I couldn't contact you"


There is no tense mismatch, Fresco. What of,

My fingers are all broken [holds the bandaged fingers up, "See"] so I couldn't dial the phone.



While that particular glossing is a possibility, it is not the only one. We often hear the same argument put forward for,

"I had my watch stolen", which can mean, though rarely does, "I arranged to have my watch stolen". The more common and therefore more likely meaning is, "My watch was stolen".



That's certainly a possibility but so is,

Gunpowder was invented in China, where it is [still] used for fireworks [today].

There is a persistent rumor that tenses have to match but that is just false. If that were so, then there would be things that we couldn't say. That's not a viable proposition for language or life.

I agree that the tense mismatch is insignificant, but the fact that all fireworks now tend to contain gunpowder irrespective of their place of manufacture makes the inclusion of "the first" semantically significant.

But there is no tense mismatch, Fresco, significant or insignificant.

[/quote]but the fact that all fireworks now tend to contain gunpowder irrespective of their place of manufacture makes the inclusion of "the first" semantically significant.[/quote]

I agree, it's significant for,

Gunpowder was invented in China, where it was used for (the first) fireworks,

but it's not significant for other examples, such as the one I gave.

had been stole is the passive form of had stolen. and you use couldn't (modal of ability= past form)

Modal verbs don't have present and past forms, Basenpat. In modern English, they are tenseless.