Re: With or without been.
Yuftos, you're driving me crazy with the punctuation errors!
When writing in English, after every comma, you must leave a space.
Prior to and after parenthesis, you must leave a space. Example: John and Iris (both students in my biology class) have volunteered to carry the extra backpacks. The purpose of the space is to differenciate between the phrase immediately preceeding (and/or following) the parenthesis and the phrase inside of the parenthesis.
After every period and after every question mark, you must leave two spaces, because you're separating sentences. The purpose of the period and the question mark is to show the end of a sentence or a question.
If you use a period within a sentence, such as saying Mr. Williams or Dr. Luisa Mondragon, you must leave a single space after the period.
A decimal point, however, is different: "Gina paid $112.09 for the repairs, and she had enough money left over to eat lunch."
ALL English sentences begin with a capital letter. For this reason, NO English sentence should ever begin with a number that is not spelled out.
Incorrect:
8 people are seated in the first compartment of the train.
Correct:
Eight people are seated in the first compartment of the train.
Incorrect:
22% of the buildings were damaged by the flood.
Correct:
Twenty-two percent of the buildings were damaged by the flood.
A colon and a semi-colon are treated just like commas; you must leave a space between the colon or semi-colon and its following phrase.
The reason I bring up these discrepancies is that it makes your writings much easier to read and much easier to understand when the punctuation and spacing are correct.
.................................................. .................................................. ......
As for the 'been' question, I agree with the multitude and the variety of answers you've received.
I think it's more correct to say that the roads have been flooded, or that the roads were flooded; as opposed to the roads flooded, because the latter suggests that the roads committed the action of flooding. Roads are inanimate objects, so they canoot flood themselves. Flooding is the act that was perpetrated upon the roads.
Having said that, it's not INcorrect to say the roads flooded, as in, "When the heavy rains fell, the roads flooded."
It all depends on the greater context of the sentence as a whole.
Thank you.