Unit 5a Book

How good is your memory? Unit 4c focused on giving oral instructions while demonstrating how to solder. See what you can recall by completing this task. If you have problems completing the task, go back to Unit 4c to brush off your knowledge.

While doing the task, you might have noticed that the description of the process was quite simple and took a form of instructions. This is quite natural because the easiest way to instruct someone is to use the imperative mood and sequencers, for example:

First, turn your soldering iron on and if it has an adjustable heat control, set it to 400 °C.

This form is used in oral instructions or in manuals that come with products. However, imagine a similar process is described in a book on technical processes. Maybe, the same sentence would read as follows:

The soldering iron is first turned on, and, if it has an adjustable heat control, set to 400 °C.

Can you see the difference? The second sentence definitely sounds more formal because it uses the passive voice. You will hardly ever hear it in normal everyday conversations, but you can come across it in books. Passives were covered in Unit 2a of this Moodle course and now you have a chance to revise this grammar point. If necessary, read the grammar overview here. Then convert active sentences into passive in this exercise. The context will be the same as in the first task in this Section, i.e. soldering. This will give you a chance to see the change in the level of formality of the text after the active-passive conversion. Finally, decide whether the active or passive voice should be used in these sentences. The text is about one of the fundamental processes in electrical engineering: electrolysis.