英汉语言对-练习题-6-7-8-9-10-reference answers.docVIP

Chapter 6 Ⅰ. Answer Questions Directions: Answer the Questions in English briefly, with examples if necessary. The passive voice is widely used in our daily life, especially in technical writing, newspaperese and bureacratese. Passive sentence usually appears very wordy, indirect, but we cannot be misled by them. By analysis, mostly they are just impersonal structure. For use of passive structure, there are four agentive reasons. The first one is the difficulties in expressing the unknown agent. For example, “the murderer was caught yesterday, and it is said that he will be hanged.” The second one is the self-evidence of the agent from the context. The third one is the importance of the receptor over the agent or the emphasis on the receptor. The forth one is no need to express the agent for some special factors. The first syntactic consideration is to make sentences coherent. The second one is to keep sentences in balance for end focus and end weight. For example, (1) some kinds of plastics can be forced through machines which separate them into long, thin strings, called “fibres”, and these fibres can be made into cloth. (2) I was astounded that he was prepared to give me a job. The proper use of the passive expressions can make the expressive methods flexible and avoid the static sentence patterns. For example, there are many ways to make basic English sentences. Passive structure is regularly used in mainly four text genres: technical text, news text, documental text and discursive text. There are three types: expressive text, informative text and appellative text. The disadvantages of passive structure are wordy, indirect, weak, oracular, mysterious and impenetrable. Because most of the passive structures in Chinese are to express the unpleasant or undesirable things. Except for the limitation of meaning, the passive structure is also limited by form. The agent must be expressed out in Chinese passive voice. To avoid passive structure in Chinese language, the