The correct answers are The stolen painting is thought to have been destroyed by the thieves. and The mastermind is expected to be sentenced tomorrow morning.
In C2-level English, "double passives" (a passive verb followed by a passive infinitive) are perfectly acceptable with reporting verbs or verbs of expectation (like thought, expected, believed, said).
However, verbs of effort, attempt, or beginning (like try, attempt, begin) create grammatically unacceptable double passives. Instead of "was tried to be recovered," we must use an active infinitive ("They tried to recover...") or a noun phrase ("An attempt was made to recover...").
Passive voice
- ✅ The meal was cooked by the chef. — passive (action matters)
- ✅ Mistakes were made. — passive, agent hidden (evasive)
- ✅ Active: The chef cooked the meal. — stronger, clearer
- ❌ The report was being been written. — malformed passive
The passive = be + past participle. Object becomes subject. Use it when the doer is unknown, irrelevant, or obvious. Avoid when it hides responsibility or weakens prose.
Formula: find the active object → make it the subject → use be (matching tense) + past participle → optionally add by + agent.
Infinitive
- ✅ I want to go. — to-infinitive after want
- ✅ She can swim. — bare infinitive after modal
- ✅ Let me help. — bare infinitive after let
- ❌ I enjoy to read. — wrong (enjoy takes gerund, not infinitive)
The infinitive has two forms: to-infinitive (to go) after verbs like want, decide, plan, hope; bare infinitive (go) after modals and causatives (let, make, help).
Rule: after want, need, decide, plan, hope, expect, agree, refuse → to-infinitive. After can, will, must, let, make → bare infinitive. After enjoy, avoid, finish → gerund, NOT infinitive.
Sentence
- She left. — simple (one independent clause)
- She left, and he stayed. — compound (two independents)
- She left because she was tired. — complex (independent + dependent)
- She left because she was tired, and he stayed. — compound-complex
A sentence = one or more clauses forming a complete thought, ending with terminal punctuation. Four types based on clause structure: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex.
Minimum requirement: at least one independent clause with a subject + finite verb. Without that → fragment.
C2 | Proficiency
- ✅ His was a pyrrhic victory, if ever there was one. — literary allusion + inversion
- ✅ She'd have been none the wiser had he not let slip. — inverted conditional + idiom
- ✅ The proposal, laudable though it may be, fails on pragmatic grounds. — formal concession
- ✅ "Nice weather," he deadpanned, eyeing the hailstones. — irony + narrative register
These are C2 patterns — the highest CEFR level. At C2 you handle literary allusion, irony, any register, and complex written argument with native-like precision across all subjects.
Marker: if your English is indistinguishable from an educated native speaker's across registers, you're C2.
Hard
- Had she not intervened, the situation would have escalated. — inverted conditional
- All distractors are grammatically plausible in other contexts
- Multiple rules interact (e.g., tense + aspect + modality)
- Context determines the answer — no single "rule" is enough
Hard marks upper-intermediate to advanced challenges: B2+, interacting rules, edge cases, plausible distractors, and contexts where pattern-matching fails.
Use "Hard" when Easy/Medium feel trivial and you want to test whether you actually understand a rule versus just recognising surface patterns.