"Get" Passive vs "Be" Passive in Technical English
5 exercises — practise choosing between the dynamic "get" passive and the formal "be" passive.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence best fits an informal Slack update announcing that a change of state just happened?
"The build just got fixed after the flaky test was quarantined" is correct: the "get" passive ("got fixed") emphasizes a sudden change of state and fits the informal, event-focused tone of a chat update. Option B misuses "is" with "just", which doesn't mark the completed change naturally. Option C incorrectly stacks "just was" instead of the idiomatic "got" passive or simple past "was fixed". Option D uses present tense "gets", which doesn't match the completed, one-time event described.
2 / 5
Choose the sentence that correctly uses the neutral, formal "be" passive appropriate for an official incident report.
"The affected service was restored at 03:14 UTC after the failover completed" is correct: the standard "be" passive is the expected register for formal incident documentation, stating a fact neutrally. Option B uses the more informal "get" passive, which is stylistically inappropriate for an official report. Option C incorrectly implies an ongoing process at a specific timestamp rather than a completed event. Option D uses present tense, which doesn't match the past, timestamped event.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "get" + past participle to describe something unpleasant or unexpected happening to the subject?
"Our staging environment got hacked overnight through an exposed debug endpoint" is correct: "get" + past participle ("hacked") is idiomatic for describing an unexpected, often negative event affecting the subject. Option B incorrectly uses the base form "hack" instead of the past participle "hacked". Option C uses present tense with the wrong participle form. Option D incorrectly follows "got" with the present participle "hacking" instead of the past participle "hacked".
4 / 5
Select the sentence where the "get" passive most naturally replaces a reflexive-sounding construction for a self-triggered action.
"The pipeline got triggered automatically whenever a tag is pushed" is correct: "got triggered" is a grammatical "get" passive with the correct past participle form, fitting a description of an automatic system event. Option B uses the base form "trigger" instead of "triggered" after "gets". Option C uses "automatical", not a valid adverb (should be "automatically"). Option D uses the base form "trigger" instead of the required past participle.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly shows that "be" passive, not "get" passive, is preferred for stating a permanent or official system property in documentation?
"All API responses are encoded in UTF-8 by default" is correct: the "be" passive in the present simple states a stable, permanent system fact, exactly right for reference documentation. Option B's "get encoded" sounds like a repeated dynamic event rather than a fixed, defining property, which is a stylistic mismatch for formal specs. Option C wrongly presents a permanent fact as an ongoing, temporary process. Option D uses the past tense, incorrectly suggesting this was a one-time historical event rather than an always-true default.