Well let’s hope that he wasn’t injured but……VOLTS DON’T GO THROUGH anything. Volts are the electrical "pressure" which need to be applied ACROSS something to make the electricity flow. What actually flows (through the thing with a voltage across) is a CURRENT, and if the current goes through a person it can kill him/her.

Current cannot flow through something without a voltage difference applied across it…..if a bird sits on a high voltage wire it feels nothing because the electricity has nowhere to flow to..the bird just becomes a part of the wire (electrically speaking). Likewise if you stand a torch bulb on one terminal of a battery it will not light up as the current has no way of flowing back to the other side of the battery.
If however there is a route from a higher voltage region to a lower voltage region then a current can flow. If a metal wire is connected from the high voltage wire to the Earth, then the current will flow down the wire (because Earth voltage is zero volts). If a wire is connected from the second terminal of the bulb we talked about above, to the other end of the battery then there is a complete circuit and a current can flow.

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