It looks passive to me, due to the structure to be + past participle. However, if I take Z as a doer of the verb locate and change it around as in Z locates X, I am very confused with the meaning which I feel different from that in the "passive" format. I need to explain this to my students.
Learn English – Is the sentence “X is located in Y” active or passive voice
passive-voice
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There is nothing grammatically incorrect about
His room is being painted by John.
However it doesn't carry the exact same meaning as
John is painting his room.
The first (passive) means that John is painting someone else's room, where as the second (active) could mean that, but it's more likely that it means that John is painting his own room.
You clearly know how to form the passive, but the change that needs to take place is that you need to make sure the same person is doing the same thing to the same object as in the active.
If we assume the room in "John is painting his room" to be John's room, which is most likely without further context, then to turn it to a passive construction you need to start by specifying whose room it is: John's room.
Next you make the action of painting passive, which you did correctly: is being painted.
Finally you specify who is doing the painting: by him.
John's room is being painted by him.
The last part (by him) can cause the inverse ambiguity of the original (active) sentence, i.e. we assume the him refers to John but it could refer to someone else. To completely remove the ambiguity you could change the last bit:
John's room is being painted by John, himself.
But usually the given context removes ambiguity.
The idea of "converting" an active to a passive and vice versa is something of a misnomer. You can create pairs of active/passive sentences that are approximately equal in meaning, but probably never exactly equivalent.
One reason for this has to do with information theory, in other words, the types of things/information that we tend to "encode" in particular syntactic positions in a sentence. In the sentence "I gave Dave the book", I am focussing slightly on my action of giving compared to "Dave was given the book", where I focus slightly on the impact of David receiving the book. This means that it is odd to "convert" e.g. "The bus left the station" into "The station was left by the bus", because we don't conceptualise the movement of a bus from a station as having an "impact" on the station. (Other cases where the passive would be odd include e.g. "A headache was given to Jane", "The prime minister was become by David Cameron", "10 is equalled by 5+5"...)
Another reason has to do with scope effects. If I say "Chocolate is eaten by children", this tends to imply that (a) children are the only/principal entities to eat chocolate and (b) children may eat a range of other things. But if I say "Children eat chocolate", this tends to imply that (a) children primarily eat chocolate over other food, and (b) does not imply that children are the only/main entities to eat chocolate.
Best Answer
Locate is a transitive verb and so can form a passive. The active
becomes, in the passive,
However, in the construction X is located in Y, the -ed form of the verb is a participial adjective acting as the complement of the verb be. The question of voice does not arise. No one, I imagine, would think of sentences such as I am tired, This problem is complicated or They were very pleased as being any kind of passive. So it is with sentences like Paris is located in France and The key was located in the second drawer on the left.
EDIT:
Huddleston and Pullum, authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’ distinguish between the ‘adjectival passive’ and the ‘be-passive’. In the sentence ‘Paris is located in France’, ‘located’ is the former, but the sentence ‘The source of the river was located by the three travellers’ is the latter. They point out that the difference is that when the verb preceding an adjectival passive is ‘be’, it can be substituted by another verb. So, we can say ‘Paris remains located in France’, but in the second sentence, there is no alternative to ‘was’.