Change the following sentence into Active voice:
The bird was killed by a cruel boy.

Question

Change the following sentence into Active voice: 
The bird was killed by a cruel boy.

Accepted Answer

Here's a detailed explanation for why Option 2 is correct and why the other options are incorrect:

The original sentence is: "The bird was killed by a cruel boy."
This sentence is in the **Passive Voice** and its tense is **Past Simple**.

To change a passive voice sentence into active voice, we follow these steps:
1.  Identify the agent (the doer of the action) in the passive sentence. This is usually found after "by." In this case, it's "a cruel boy." This agent will become the subject of the active sentence.
2.  Identify the verb and its tense. "was killed" is Past Simple Passive.
3.  Identify the object of the action in the passive sentence (the subject of the passive sentence). In this case, it's "The bird." This will become the object of the active sentence.
4.  Convert the passive verb into its active form while retaining the original tense. For Past Simple Passive ("was/were + V3"), the active form is the simple past tense verb (V2).

Let's apply these steps to the given options:

**Correct Option: 2. A cruel boy killed the bird.**

*   **Justification:**
    *   **Subject:** "A cruel boy" correctly becomes the subject of the active sentence, as he is the doer of the action.
    *   **Verb:** "killed" is the simple past tense (V2) form of the verb "kill." This correctly converts the Past Simple Passive "was killed" into its Past Simple Active equivalent. The tense remains consistent.
    *   **Object:** "the bird" correctly becomes the object of the active sentence.
    *   **Meaning:** The meaning of the sentence remains exactly the same: a cruel boy performed the action of killing, and the bird was the recipient of that action.
    *   This option perfectly follows all the rules for converting a Past Simple Passive sentence to Past Simple Active.

**Incorrect Options:**

**1. A cruel boy had killed the bird.**
*   **Reason for incorrectness:** This sentence uses the **Past Perfect** tense ("had killed"). The original sentence "The bird was killed by a cruel boy" is in the **Past Simple** tense. When converting from passive to active voice, the tense of the sentence must remain the same. Changing the tense makes this option incorrect.

**3. A cruel boy was killed the bird.**
*   **Reason for incorrectness:** This sentence is grammatically incorrect and does not make sense as an active voice conversion. "was killed" is a passive verb form. If "A cruel boy" is the subject, the verb must be active. The structure "Subject + was killed + Object" is not a valid active voice construction. It would imply that the cruel boy himself was killed, not that he killed the bird.

**4. A boy killed the cruel bird.**
*   **Reason for incorrectness:** This option changes the meaning of the original sentence. In the original sentence, the adjective "cruel" describes the "boy" ("a cruel boy"). In this option, "cruel" is used to describe the "bird" ("the cruel bird"). While the voice conversion (Past Simple Active) is correct, altering the meaning by misplacing or changing the description of the nouns makes this option incorrect. The active voice conversion must preserve the original meaning and the attributes of the nouns.