If the average American eats 10 to 12 pounds of chocolate a
year, then I’m already falling behind for 2011. That’s okay;
eating more chocolate is not one of my New Year’s resolutions! I
do love chocolate, though! I even enjoy reading about it. While
researching the chocolate crisis for an earlier post, I learned
that it can take four days to make chocolate “from bean to bar.”
(“Bean to bar” means from the time the cacao beans reach the
manufacturer to the time the finished chocolate bars are ready
to be shipped out.) The manufacturing process of chocolate is
not only interesting, but it gives us a great opportunity to
practice using passive voice in English! The passive voice is
formed by combining any form of to be with the past participle
of a verb. The past participle is the “ed” form in regular
verbs. Only verbs that take an object (transitive verbs) can be
used in passive voice. The passive voice is useful when you want
to focus on an action and not on the person who performed the
action. When talking ab