People

Look around your classroom for a moment. Every face is different — a long one beside an oval one, curly black hair next to straight brown hair, the boy in the back row who's already taller than the teacher. Now think how hard it is to say all of that in English. "He is — er — that tall one, you know, with the…" You point and give up.

This first unit fixes exactly that. By the end you'll be able to describe any person — what they look like and what they're like inside — in clear English sentences. You'll also learn how to report what someone said ("Uncle Angelo said that he looked very nice") and how to write a short description of a friend that an examiner would happily give full marks for.

Think of it as building three small skills, one on top of the next: appearance, then qualities, then reported speech. Tackle them in that order and the writing tasks at the end will feel almost easy.

Here's something a good English teacher knows: when you try to describe a person, your brain doesn't search for ALL words at once — it searches one box at a time. First you notice age. Then face shape. Then maybe hair. Then height. The NIE textbook quietly arranges its appearance vocabulary in exactly those six boxes — and once you carry them in your head, you'll never freeze mid-sentence again.

Think of it like a small toolbox. You don't tip every tool onto the floor when you want to fix a window — you reach into the right drawer. The drawer for age, the drawer for face, the drawer for hair. Six drawers, two minutes of memorising, a year of easy marks.

Notice what Rasuni and Venura just did. They praised each other warmly, but then they also admitted a weakness — Rasuni said she's oversensitive, Venura said she sometimes worries about being too generous. That little move — praise plus an honest weakness — is what real conversations sound like. It also happens to be exactly the pattern examiners reward in Test 8 ("Write a paragraph about your best friend"). Three positives, one small weakness, one quick example. Done.

So learn the two columns below not as lists to memorise but as a friendly palette. When you describe someone you admire, reach into the green column for three words. Then reach into the red column for one — just one — and your paragraph stops sounding like a fan page and starts sounding like real, human writing.

Picture this. Your mother picks you up after school and asks, "What did Sajini say?" You can't answer with quotation marks in the air — you have to report what your friend said in your own sentence. That tiny daily act is reported speech, and English has one quiet rule about it: when you retell something, the verb takes one small step backwards in time.

Why a step backwards? Because by the time you're retelling, the speaking has already happened. Sajini said it in her now. You're reporting it in your later. So the verb leans back to match. Present becomes past; past becomes past-perfect. Just one step — never two, never forward. Once you see verbs as small people who step one pace into the past whenever they get reported, the whole topic clicks.

Here's the textbook's own example, the Uncle Angelo lines from page 8, with the step-back shown in colour:

• Direct: Uncle Angelo said, "It looks very nice."
  Reported: Uncle Angelo said that it looked very nice.
  The verb stepped one pace back: present looks → past looked.
• Direct: Uncle Angelo said, "He is my new boss."
  Reported: Uncle Angelo said that he was his new boss.
  "is" stepped back to "was". Also "my" became "his" because you, the reporter, are not Uncle Angelo.
• Direct: Uncle Angelo said, "I decided to shave it off."
  Reported: Uncle Angelo said that he had decided to shave it off.
  Already past? Then it steps back into past perfect: decided → had decided.

The same step-back applies right across the verb family. will becomes would, can becomes could, may becomes might, must becomes had to. And the time-and-place words travel with them: today becomes that day, tomorrow becomes the next day, here becomes there.

What about questions? Questions are friendly — they just need one small adjustment. For yes/no questions, slip in if or whether. For wh- questions, keep the question word but use ordinary sentence order, not the question word order. Read these two carefully and feel the difference:

• "Are you tired?" → He asked if I was tired.
• "Where is the book?" → She asked where the book was. (Not "where was the book" — that's a question shape, and we're not asking anymore, we're telling.)

Here's a small magic trick the unit ends with. Daniel, the poet, fits a whole person — what he likes, what he fears, what he dreams of — into eight short lines. No "He is good at cricket. He is good at music. He is nice." Just eight slim lines that somehow make you feel you've met him.

Read it slowly. See if you can picture Daniel by the end.