verified answer

Revise the following sentences so that their verbs are in the active voice. Some sentences could contain more than one passive verb; correct them all, rewriting them when necessary. Please do not merely eliminate information that you find difficult to revise into active voice.
Example:
The bodies were discovered in the wreckage by several children as they were walking to school.
Answer:
Several children discovered the bodies in the wreckage as they walked to school.
Remember, you need to find the agent—the person or thing that is performing the action expressed in the verb—and make it the subject of the sentence:
• Do a global search for the words "was" and then "were." These words often indicate the passive voice.
• Cross out the "was" or the "were."
• Add -ed to the verb that follows "was" or "were."
• If that changed verb does not make grammatical sense, it is an irregular verb, so change it to the simple past tense.
• Move the active sentence's direct object into the sentence's subject slot
• Place the active sentence's subject into a phrase beginning with the preposition by
• Add a form of the auxiliary verb be to the main verb and change the main verb's form

Here are the sentences:
1. The $5 million gift, which had been hammered out after weeks of negotiation by the company and prosecutors, was hailed by the school, in South Orange, N.J., as a cornerstone of its new center on business ethics.
2. Shirley Temple Black, the former child star and diplomat whose films in the 1930s were cheered by Depression-weary moviegoers, died Monday at age 85 of causes that were not disclosed.
3. China and Taiwan said they were ready Tuesday to establish a formal government-level dialogue for the first time in 65 years.
4. The first state dinner featuring foreign dignitaries was hosted by Ulysses S. Grant for the King of the Sandwich Islands, who was touring the country in December 1874.
5. NBC’s Bob Costas, who has been anchoring prime-time Olympic broadcasts since 1998, was sidelined Tuesday by an infection that was in both his eyes.
6. Of the 103 people who died when an Algerian military transport that was being flown to Constantine slammed into a mountain near Ain Kercha, only 55 had been found by night fall.
7. The dogs were picked up by the animal rights activists in alleys and at construction sites across Soshi where the strays once were pets and guard dogs.
8. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported an average of 44 million people were on food stamps last year, including 360,000 people who had been recipients of master’s and doctoral degrees.
9. Two men were charged in the Friday shooting of an 8-year-old District girl who had been struck in the upper left chest by a stray bullet when she was leaving her aunt’s home on Valentine’s Day.
10. Waite was the kind and steady patriarch of a tight-knit rural Southern family on TV, a role that was in sharp contrast to his personal life, which was marked by struggles with alcoholism off- screen, he told the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2010.
11. Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable was hailed by industry analysts as a smart move to help cable companies stem an industry-wide decline in cable TV viewers that was being fueled by the growing popularity of services such as Hulu, Aero and Netflix.
12. Eighteen deer have been spayed in six days by contractors White Buffalo Inc. as part of Fairfax City’s efforts to control the animal’s population naturally without having to use lethal force in the densely populated city.