Healthy Food

Here's a quiet little wonder: the kurakkan porridge your grandmother cooked because it was cheap and filling is the very thing doctors now prescribe to diabetics at a high price. Old village food turns out to be modern medicine. This unit puts Sri Lankan food at the centre and teaches the English you need to talk about it well.

But notice what "talking about food well" actually demands. You have to join ideas that pull against each other ("although it's healthy, children avoid it"), handle the odd science words with strange plurals (one nucleus, two nuclei), and read a chart of what people eat and turn it into clean sentences. So under the food, this unit is really drilling connectives, irregular plurals, and the very exam-heavy skill of describing a graph.

See the engine driving this passage — little linking words like "therefore", "as a result" and "because". They turn a list of facts into an argument: fibre → easy digestion → cure for constipation; slow digestion → steady blood sugar → good for diabetics. When you write your own food paragraph, copy this move: don't just say a food is healthy, show the chain from what's in it to what it does for the body.

Sort these into four jobs and they're far easier to use. Some name the good stuff inside the food (the nutrients), some describe the food (the adjectives), some say what it does for you (the benefits), and some name the actual Sri Lankan foods. A strong food paragraph usually pulls one word from each row — a staple that is nutritious because of a nutrient that gives a benefit.

Real life is full of "but" — the food is healthy but children avoid it; the dish takes ages but it's worth it. Connectives are the words that let you hold two clashing ideas in one neat sentence instead of two short choppy ones. They're the hinges that join contrast or things happening at the same time.

The trick that trips everyone is not which connective means what — most of them mean "despite this" — but what kind of word is allowed to come after. Some demand a full clause (a subject and a verb); others demand just a noun or an "-ing" word. Get that grammar-shape right and the meaning takes care of itself.

Here's the exact slip examiners hunt for. A student writes "In spite of he is sick, he came." It feels right, but "in spite of" can't take a full clause — it wants a noun or an -ing word. So it must become "In spite of being sick…" or "In spite of his sickness…". If you really want to keep the full clause "he was sick", swap to although: "Although he was sick, he came." Same meaning, different doorway.

Most English nouns make their plural the lazy way — just stick an -s on the end. But a stubborn group, mostly old words borrowed from Latin and Greek, carry their plural the way their original language did. They didn't adopt the English -s, so "nucleus" becomes "nuclei", not "nucleuses". These are exactly the science-y words a Health or Science passage uses, which is why the exam tests them.

You can't reason these out — they have to be learned as pairs, like vocabulary. But there are patterns to lean on: many -us words turn to -i, many -um and -on words turn to -a, and -is words turn to -es.

Then there are compound nouns — the ones joined with hyphens. The rule here is logical once you see it: pluralise the main word, the real noun, not the little describing bits. You have several fathers who are each in-law, so it's "fathers-in-law", never "father-in-laws". Find the head noun and add the -s there.

• father-in-law → fathers-in-law
• sister-in-law → sisters-in-law
• passer-by → passers-by
• commander-in-chief → commanders-in-chief
• notary public → notaries public
• teacher-in-charge → teachers-in-charge

Almost every paper drops a bar chart, pie chart or table in front of you and says "describe it in 100 words". Students panic and either copy out every number or write vague mush. Neither earns the marks. The secret is that a good description isn't a number-dump — it's a guided tour, walking the reader from the biggest thing to the smallest and ending with the big-picture point.

Think of yourself as a tour guide pointing at the data: "here's the tallest bar… here are the middle ones… here's the smallest… and here's what it all means." That gives you a reliable five-line shape you can use on any chart that appears:

1. Title sentence: "The bar chart shows the percentage of children who eat wheat-based food in an urban area."
2. Most: "Bread is the most popular item at 40%."
3. Middle / equal: "Rotti and biscuits attract 35% and 30% of children respectively."
4. Least: "Pastries are the least popular at only 5%."
5. Closing insight: "In summary, more than three-quarters of urban children rely on wheat-based food."

The marks live in the comparison words, so stock them: most / least popular · maximum / minimum · highest / lowest · equal to · more than · less than · twice as many · approximately · in summary. And mind a tiny grammar trap — "the graph" is singular, so it is "the graph shows", not "the graph show".