Formeel passief
Er wordt, dient te worden, is vastgesteld: institutional Dutch with nobody in it.
B1 passive is a form; B2 passive is a register. Formal Dutch layers it: an obligation becomes dient te worden, a finding becomes is vastgesteld, and a whole sentence can run with no subject at all in er wordt. The point is not the grammar, which is the same worden and zijn as before, but that this is the voice institutions write in — and a B2 candidate is expected to both read it and produce it. Written in the active, the same content reads as a complaint from a private person; written this way it reads as a document.
How the exam tests this
Both halves, and the register is the point. In Lezen the source texts are policy documents, reports and formal correspondence, and they are written almost entirely in this voice; a sentence like er wordt onderzocht of has no actor to attach the fact to, and reading one in is how a question gets answered wrongly. In Schrijven the medium task can hand you a table or a graphic and ask you to describe what it shows and propose something — a description of data is naturally passive, and a proposal phrased as dient te worden carries an authority the active voice cannot.
What is wrong with this sentence?
De cijfers zeggen ons dat wij minder aanvragen hebben gezien.
Most candidates write it exactly like this and lose the mark without knowing why.
The rest of this lesson
The rule, the worked examples, the exceptions and what to do in the exam room open with Mastery, together with every other lesson for this exam.
See plans