The sentence may recount the same facts, or it may not. One very significant difference is that in the active voice you must identify the Agent: the person (or other entity) who  performs the action, whereas in the passive you are free to omit the Agent.

Active


  ok John stole my book.
  &lowast;&nbsp; Stole my book. 


Passive


  ok My book was stolen by John.
  ok My book was stolen.  


In either case, the passive voice is employed to focus on the Patient of the action&mdash;the person or thing which 'suffered' it&mdash;rather than on Agent who or which performed it. There are several reasons you might want to do this:


Because you don&rsquo;t know or don&rsquo;t care who performed the action  
Because what is important is the action itself rather than who performed it
Because what is important is the result of the action rather than who performed it 
Because you want your readers to think of the action as 'impersonal'  


The last reason became particularly important in the 19th century, when scientific writers&mdash;or writers who wanted to be thought of as adopting a 'scientific' attitude&mdash;were particularly careful to banish any suggestion that the writer's personality or attitudes had any influence on what was reported. The passive voice remains to this day something of a fetish in the sciences, particularly in the 'soft' sciences, where there is still substantial anxiety about the scientific status and value of the work done. 



&lowast;&nbsp; marks an utterance as ungrammatical.

What is the purpose of active and passive voice?
Quite simple question but tried about everything.

what i want is 2 (actually 5) divs next to eachother with the class "container" so i can make a horizontal 1page website. Each div has to be 100% wide. so 2 divs mean 2 screens next to eachother.

This is the css line i have now:

.container { width: 100%; float: left; display: inline; }


I cant get them to line up next to each other.

Here is a visual to make it more clear.

image url for bigger preview: http://www.luukratief.com/stackoverflow.png

The scrolling part is not the issue for me, just the placement of the divs.

Is this possible using percentages or is this simply not possible.
If so, please tell me how to do this with css.

Thanks in advance!
