Personality

Think of two classmates who look almost the same — same height, same uniform — and yet you'd never confuse them. One is always first to help, the other always cracking jokes. That invisible difference is personality: the habits, reactions and qualities that make each of us one of a kind. If Unit 1 taught you to describe what people look like, this unit teaches you to describe who they are.

And it has its own slice of English. The grammar that fits here is the small family of pronouns that point back at people: reciprocal pronouns (each other vs one another) for when people act on each other, and reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, himself) for when someone acts on themselves. You'll also learn to read and describe a bar graph. The writing tasks — a personality speech, a graph description, an essay — all flow from there.

Look at how Vidath builds his speech: he starts with a personal spark ("I read an article… this made me think about my own personality"), then asks the big question — "From where do we get our personality?" — and answers it ("by birth and by the environment"). A speech that asks then answers pulls the listener along, because the human mind can't help reaching for an answer once a question is hanging in the air. When you write a speech in Test 16, plant a question or two; it instantly sounds more confident than a flat list of facts.

Every personality word has a twin on the other side of a coin. The very same energy that we praise as "determined" we criticise as "stubborn" when we don't like it; "confident" and "arrogant" describe almost the same behaviour seen by a friend and by an enemy. So keep the two columns side by side in your mind — it teaches you that describing character is really about shades, not black and white.

When two friends shake hands, something travels both ways at once — you greet me and I greet you, in the same moment. English has a special pair of pronouns for exactly that back-and-forth: each other and one another. They're called reciprocal because the action bounces between the people, like a ball passed to and fro.

The only thing to keep straight is how many people. Picture it: two people facing each other, versus a whole circle of friends. Each other is for the pair (just two); one another is for the crowd (more than two). If you can see two faces, it's "each other".

One slip everyone makes: writing "each others". There is no plural form — the word already means "the two of them", so it never takes an -s. To show belonging, the apostrophe goes in the right place: "The students copied each other's notes" and "one another's".

Sometimes the person doing the action and the person it lands on are the very same person. "I cut myself" — I did the cutting and I got cut. For that, English bends the pronoun back on itself like a mirror reflecting you, and adds -self for one person or -selves for many. That's why they're called reflexive: the action reflects straight back to the subject.

So the test is simple — ask "did the action come back to the same person who started it?" If yes, reach for the -self word. "She taught herself guitar" (she taught, she learned). "We enjoyed ourselves" (we did the enjoying, we had the fun).

The trap is the plural endings. One person ends in -self (myself, yourself, himself); two or more end in -selves (ourselves, yourselves, themselves). The word that catches almost everyone is the made-up "ourself" — there's no such thing; "we" is always plural, so it's ourselves.

A bar graph is a picture of numbers, and your job is to turn that picture back into a few clean sentences — like a tour guide describing a view so well that a listener can see it without looking. You don't mention every single bar; you point out the tallest, sketch the middle, name the shortest, and finish with what it all means.

To do that smoothly you need a small kit of comparison phrases. Learn these six and you can describe almost any chart the exam throws at you:

• The majority of… — most of them
• Least number of… / minimum — the fewest
• Approximately… — about / roughly
• Maximum — the largest
• Equal number of… — the same as
• More than / less than… — straight comparison

Then pour them into the Test-14 shape: title sentence → the most → the middle → the least → one closing insight. The closing insight (what the numbers suggest) is what lifts a description from a list into real writing.

Feel how the repeated "we, we, and only we" at the end thuds like a drumbeat — the poet is accusing all of us, himself included, of selfishness in a "speedy materialistic race". The bitter joke is in line six: "we are pushing each other" instead of helping. He uses the very reciprocal pronouns from this unit, but turned sour — what should describe people caring for one another now describes people shoving past one another. That\'s how a poem makes a point: by twisting an ordinary phrase until you feel its edge.

Questions to try yourself: What is valued most by the poet — quote the lines. What do "we are pushing each other, we have no human values" tell us about modern society? Which human values do you think we are losing?