Questions

[Ruifeng]

My bike is gone! It___(is or was) stolen!

When do we use "is/are + past participle" to describe a current state? Is it just limited to some certain words like broken, finished or is it common?

Thanks

[Dozy]

In this case "It's been stolen" is most likely.

If you choose a verb at random, I suppose the likelihood is that it is not commonly used in the pattern "is/are + past participle" to describe a current state. However, verbs that are used like this are not especially rare. For example, glancing through the first few rows at http://www.acme2k.co.uk/Acme/3star%20verbs.htm we can pick out:

accepted
settled
covered
expected
shared
tested
paid
affected
checked
cut
hidden
liked

(I'm excluding cases where the sense would be more of a passive verb, such as "it's owned by my brother" or "it's performed every night".)