5 exercises — practise impersonal passive reporting patterns in postmortems and status updates.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses the impersonal passive "it is reported that" pattern in an incident summary?
"It is reported that..." is correct: this impersonal passive pattern uses dummy subject "it" + passive reporting verb + "that"-clause to attribute a claim without naming the source, a common hedge in incident summaries when the reporting source is a monitoring system or unconfirmed source. Option B scrambles the auxiliary and participle order ("it reported is"), which is ungrammatical. Option C incorrectly forms this as a question via inversion, which does not fit a declarative statement. Option D misplaces "that" after "reported the outage" instead of before the clause it introduces, breaking the clause boundary.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses the "subject + is reported to + infinitive" raised-passive pattern as an alternative to "it is reported that"?
"The root cause is reported to have been a memory leak" is correct: this is the "subject-raising" passive alternative to "it is reported that the root cause was...", where the logical subject of the "that"-clause ("the root cause") is promoted to the main clause subject, followed by "to have been" (a perfect infinitive expressing that the reported event happened before now). Option B incorrectly mixes "reported that" with an infinitive-style raised subject, which is not a valid combination — "reported that" requires a full finite clause, not "have been". Option C inverts the word order ungrammatically. Option D places "reported" between the subject and "is", disrupting the required auxiliary-participle sequence.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "it is believed that" to hedge an unconfirmed technical claim in a postmortem?
"It is believed that..." is correct: this passive hedging construction distances the writer from full certainty about the claim, appropriate for a postmortem where root cause is still "pending further investigation". Option B uses "believes" without the passive auxiliary "is" and without a valid subject for the active verb (dummy "it" cannot actively "believe" something) — this misuses "it" as if it were an animate subject. Option C misplaces "that" after "the race condition" rather than immediately after "believed", breaking the clause. Option D incorrectly uses the progressive "-ing" form ("is believing"), which does not fit this fixed reporting-passive pattern; belief verbs like "believe" are not normally used in the progressive.
4 / 5
Choose the sentence with the correct tense sequencing in a raised passive describing a past technical event reported now.
"Is understood to have affected" is correct: the perfect infinitive "to have affected" signals that the affecting happened before the present reporting moment (all pre-2.0 versions were already released and already affected), matching how the claim is currently understood. Option A uses the plain infinitive "to affect", which would suggest an ongoing or future-oriented state rather than a completed past situation now being reported on — a subtly different, less accurate meaning for versions already released. Option C incorrectly uses a gerund "to affecting", which is not a valid infinitive form. Option D scrambles the word order, placing "understood" between the subject and "is".
5 / 5
A status update says: "_____ that the fix will be backported to the LTS branch next week." Choose the correct impersonal passive opening.
"It is expected that..." is correct: the passive reporting pattern with dummy subject "it" is the standard impersonal way to convey a plan or forecast without naming who specifically expects it (the team, management, etc.), fitting the hedged, professional tone of a status update. "It expects" (option B) incorrectly treats "it" as an active, animate subject capable of expecting something, which is not idiomatic here. "It is expecting" (option C) uses the progressive form, which does not fit this fixed stative-passive reporting pattern. "Expected it is" (option D) scrambles the word order into a non-standard, ungrammatical sequence.