Identify the correct Active Voice of the following sentence The clown was being laughed at by them.

The passive here is was being + V3, which is the past continuous passive. The active form keeps the same tense, so it becomes was/were + V-ing. The subject 'them' becomes the doer, and the phrasal verb 'laugh at' stays intact. So the answer is A: They were laughing at the clown.

• B is wrong because 'laugh at' is the phrasal verb. 'Laugh on' does not exist in this sense.
• C is wrong because 'laughed' is simple past. It drops the continuous aspect of 'was being'.
• D is wrong because 'have been laughing' is present perfect continuous. It changes the tense entirely.

The core concept is voice conversion with tense preservation. In Mains, the same skill shows up in precis writing and in reading the exact meaning of a sentence before you rephrase it.

Trap: Aspirants see 'laughed' in the passive and pick C, forgetting that the continuous aspect in 'was being' must survive the conversion.