Appendix B — Frequently Confused Pairs

A short glossary of pairs that examiners deliberately place side by side in MCQ options, because a rushed reader conflates them.

• "being" vs "been": "being" marks a continuous (in-progress) passive; "been" marks a perfect passive. They are never interchangeable, and a sentence can never correctly contain both back-to-back except in the (avoided) perfect-continuous passive forms noted throughout Section 2.
• "by" vs "with": "by" introduces the agent (the doer — a person, organisation, or natural force); "with" introduces the instrument or material used to perform the action. "The letter was written by the manager with a fountain pen" uses both correctly in one sentence.
• "who" vs "whom" in passive questions: when "who/whom" is the agent of a question ("Who wrote this?"), it becomes "by whom" in the passive. When "who/whom" is already the object being asked about ("Whom did the board blame?"), it becomes the new subject and reverts to the subject form "who" once promoted ("Who was blamed by the board?").
• passive of "make/let/help" (causative-adjacent verbs) vs true causatives ("have/get something done"): a true causative ("The landlord had the roof repaired") already describes an arranged action and should usually be paraphrased with "got...done" rather than force-converted into a standard passive, which loses the "arranged by someone else" nuance.
• dropped agent vs retained agent: drop "by + agent" when the agent is unknown, obvious, or a generic "someone/people/they"; retain it whenever the agent is the specific new information the sentence exists to convey.
• simple passive vs causative passive-looking form: "The car was repaired" (something happened to the car, agent unstated) is a true passive; "He had the car repaired" (subject + have + object + V3) is an active causative that merely resembles a passive on the surface — see Section 4.9 for the full distinction.
• reported active clause vs reported passive clause: reported speech never changes the underlying voice of the quoted sentence — an active original stays active (with tense back-shifted), and a passive original stays passive (with its auxiliary back-shifted); only the tense shifts, never the voice, unless the reporter deliberately recasts it for emphasis.
• "consist of / comprise" vs "compose": "consist of" and "comprise" are stative and never passivize ("The committee consists of five members," never "is consisted of"); "compose," used in the sense of "make up," does allow a passive in the fixed idiom "is composed of" ("The mixture is composed of three chemicals") — a genuine exception aspirants often over-generalise away.