Success

Charlie Chaplin was earning his bread on a London stage at the age of nine. Dr. C.W.W. Kannangara fought for sixteen years so that a poor child in a village could go to school for free. Two very different lives, but both are stories — a beginning, a struggle, a triumph. That's the quiet secret of this unit: success isn't a single moment, it's a story you can tell, and English gives you the tools to tell it well.

The grammar that fits storytelling about other people is reported (indirect) speech — how you pass on what someone said without quoting them word for word ("Rasuni said she would become a scientist"). It's the tense step-back from Unit 1, now stretched further. The writing task is the biography: turning a list of bare facts into flowing past-simple prose.

Three students, three angles on the same idea: success means work hard, it means build your own road, and it means don't depend on others. Notice none of them is "wrong" — they're layers of the same truth. When an essay question asks "What is success?", this is the move that earns marks: don't give one flat definition, give two or three angles and let them build on each other. A single idea looks thin; three woven together looks thoughtful.

Tuck two or three of these into your memory, because a well-placed quotation does two jobs at once in an essay — it proves you've read, and it lets a famous voice make your point more powerfully than you could alone. Drop one into your opening or your conclusion, not the middle, where it lands hardest.

When you tell a friend what someone else said, you don't usually repeat their exact words — you report them. "I will become a scientist," said Rasuni this morning; by the time you pass it on this afternoon, the promise sits in the past, so you say "Rasuni said she would become a scientist". That's the whole idea of reported speech: because the saying is now in the past, everything inside it takes one step back in time too — like a clock wound back one notch.

Three things shift together every single time. Picture each as "stepping back": the verb steps back a tense, the pronoun changes to fit who is now speaking, and the time/place words step back from "here and now" to "there and then".

Direct: Rasuni said, "I like to work hard. I will become a successful scientist."
Reported: Rasuni said that she liked to work hard and would become a successful scientist.

1. Verbs step back one tense: like → liked · will → would · is → was · has → had · went → had gone · can → could · may → might · must → had to.
2. Pronouns change to fit the new speaker: I → he / she · my → his / her · we → they · you → I / he / she.
3. Time and place words step back: today → that day · tomorrow → the next day · yesterday → the day before · now → then · here → there · this → that.

Questions need one extra care. For a yes/no question, open with if or whether; for a wh-question, keep the wh-word — but in both cases switch to ordinary statement word order (subject before verb). That's the part everyone forgets:

• "Are you tired?" → He asked if I was tired.
• "What time is the meeting?" → She asked what time the meeting was. (not "what time was the meeting" — no question word order)

For commands and requests, drop the quotation marks and use told / asked + person + to + bare verb:

• "Sit down, please." → The teacher asked us to sit down.
• "Don't be late." → My mother told me not to be late.

And one classic trap worth burning into memory: say and tell are not twins. You tell someone, but you say something (or say to someone). "He said me" is wrong; it's "he told me" or "he said to me".

Here's the craft of biography: the notes are a heap of bricks, and writing is the mortar between them. Notice in the model below that the facts arrive in time order (nine years old → nineteen → 1913 → 1917 → his death), every verb is past simple (started, became, went, joined), and little joining words — "as a young man", "he soon became so famous that", "leaving behind" — turn a list into a life. Same facts, but now they flow.