There is a quiet little wonder hiding in this unit: the kurakkan porridge a 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, and this unit puts Sri Lankan food at the centre to teach the English you need in order 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 is healthy, children avoid it"), handle 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 underneath the food, this unit is really drilling three skills: connectives, irregular plurals, and the exam-heavy skill of describing a graph.
The Grade 10 Pupil's Book passage on kurakkan is not just praise for a grain — it keeps explaining why each good thing is true, and that cause-and-effect chain is what makes it strong informative writing. Finger millet is rich in Vitamin B, iron and calcium, and its dietary fibre helps digestion, which is why it acts as a natural remedy for constipation. It is low in fat but rich in carbohydrates, which suits people who are overweight, and because it digests slowly it keeps blood sugar at a low level — which is exactly why it has become a favourite food for diabetic patients.
The grain is turned into porridge, idli, pittu, rotti, hoppers and bread, and its popularity as a bakery product has grown as people have become more aware of its health benefits. It grows well in Anuradhapura, Kegalle, Moneragala, Hambantota, Ratnapura, Nuwara Eliya, Ampara, Badulla and Jaffna, and it is a hardy crop suited to arid highland areas — needing medium rainfall, an annual temperature of 11°C to 27°C and a soil pH of 5.0 to 8.2.
What drives the whole passage is a small set of linking words — "therefore", "as a result", "because" — which turn a list of facts into an argument: fibre leads to easy digestion, which leads to relief from constipation; slow digestion leads to steady blood sugar, which leads to being good for diabetics. When you write your own food paragraph, copy this move — do not just claim a food is healthy, show the chain from what is in it to what it does for the body.
These words sort into four jobs, and once you see the sorting they become far easier to use in a sentence. Some name the good stuff inside the food — the nutrients. Some describe the food itself — the adjectives. Some say what the food does for you — the benefits. And some simply 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.
| Category | Words |
|---|---|
| Nutrients | vitamin, iron, calcium, protein, carbohydrate, fat, fibre, mineral, antioxidant |
| Adjectives | nutritious, wholesome, organic, low-fat, high-fibre, sugar-free, gluten-free, processed, perishable, stale, fresh |
| Benefits | boosts immunity, aids digestion, prevents constipation, lowers blood sugar, strengthens bones, helps weight loss, keeps you full |
| Sri Lankan staples | rice, curd, finger millet (kurakkan), jak fruit, breadfruit, gotu kola, murunga, king coconut, samaposha |
Real life is full of "but" — the food is healthy but children avoid it; the dish takes ages but it is worth it. Connectives are the words that let you hold two clashing ideas in one neat sentence instead of two short choppy ones — the hinges that join a contrast, or join two things happening at the same time.
The trap that catches everyone is not which connective means what — most of them mean roughly "despite this" — but what kind of word is allowed to follow it. Some demand a full clause with a subject and a verb; others demand just a noun or an -ing word. Get that shape right and the meaning takes care of itself.
| Connective | Followed by | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| although / even though | a full clause (subject + verb) | contrast — despite this | Although kurakkan takes time to cook, it is worth the wait. |
| in spite of | a noun or -ing form | contrast — despite this | In spite of its health benefits, many children avoid it. |
| while | a full clause (subject + verb) | two things at the same time | Sing the song while you cook. |
| whenever | a full clause | every time that | I drink king coconut whenever I feel tired. |
Here is the exact slip examiners hunt for. A student writes "In spite of he is sick, he came." It feels right, but "in spite of" cannot 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", switch the connective instead: "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 of words, mostly borrowed from Latin and Greek, keep the plural pattern of their original language rather than adopting the English -s. That is why "nucleus" becomes "nuclei", never "nucleuses". These are exactly the science-flavoured words a health or science passage reaches for, which is why the exam tests them.
You cannot reason these out logically — they have to be learned as pairs, the way vocabulary is learned. But there are patterns worth leaning on: many -us words turn to -i, many -um and -on words turn to -a, and -is words turn to -es.
| Singular | Plural |
|---|---|
| fungus | fungi |
| nucleus | nuclei |
| bacterium | bacteria |
| phenomenon | phenomena |
| criterion | criteria |
| analysis / crisis / thesis | analyses / crises / theses |
| appendix / index | appendices / indices |
| vertebra / formula | vertebrae / formulae (or formulas) |
| child / man / woman / foot / tooth / goose | children / men / women / feet / teeth / geese |
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 around it. You have several fathers who each happen to be in-law, so it is "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.
Food vocabulary keeps bumping into a grammar question: can you count it one by one, or only measure it? An apple, an egg, a rotti — these are countable, so they take a plural and words like many, few, a few, fewer and "how many". Rice, sugar, water, curd — these are uncountable, so they never take a plural (no "rices") and instead take words like much, little, a little, less and "how much".
When you do want to give an amount of an uncountable food, you borrow a countable container or unit and attach "of": a cup of tea, a slice of bread, a spoonful of sugar, a kilo of rice, a bowl of curd. Notice the pattern — it is the container (cup, slice, spoonful, kilo, bowl) that is countable, not the food itself.
Almost every paper drops a bar chart, pie chart or table in front of you and asks for a description in about 100 words. Many students panic and either copy out every number or write vague mush, and neither approach earns marks. The secret is that a good description is not a number-dump — it is 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 is the tallest bar, here are the middle ones, here is the smallest, and here is what it all means. That gives a reliable five-line shape that works on any chart the exam gives you: a title sentence naming what the chart shows; the most popular or largest item; the middle or roughly equal items, compared against each other; the least popular or smallest item; and a closing insight that steps back and says something true about the whole picture.
The marks live in the comparison words, so it pays to 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", never "the graph show".
A model food paragraph such as "Gotu Kola — A Back-Garden Miracle" (60 words) shows the cause-and-effect logic in action: it names the food and where it grows, then ties a nutrient to a benefit ("rich in iron… known to sharpen memory") rather than simply claiming the food is healthy, then tells you how it is actually eaten — fresh as sambol, or steeped in king coconut water. A personal touch, such as a grandmother's exam-day sambol, makes the paragraph warm and memorable, and a closing image such as "a free medicine on our doorstep" gives it a final punch.
The five-line shape appears again in a model bar-chart answer describing children's wheat-food consumption (bread 40%, rotti 35%, biscuits 30%, string hoppers 25%, pastries 5%): a title sentence names the chart, then the biggest bar (bread) is introduced, then the middle pack is compared against each other ("only slightly more than…"), then the smallest (pastries) is named, and the answer closes with a summary that steps back — "more than three-quarters of urban children rely on wheat-based food." The description never just recites numbers; it compares them, and that comparison is where the marks are won.
| Task | Official word count |
|---|---|
| Notice | 40–50 words |
| Food paragraph (Test 8) | 50–60 words |
| Graph / letter description (Test 14) | ~100 words |
| Essay / article (Test 16) | ~200 words |
Two things from this unit are near-certain to appear: a connective fill-in task, and the Test 14 data-description (bar or pie chart). The chart task alone is worth ten marks and is highly predictable — master the five-line shape and you can bank those marks reliably every year.
| Past-paper test | What was tested |
|---|---|
| 2017 Test 9, 2019 Test 9 | Fill the blanks with the right connective form (although, even though, while) |
| 2019 Test 14 (b) | Pie-chart description on Mr. Perera's salary |
| 2016 Test 14 (b), 2018 Test 14 (b) | Bar-graph description tasks |
| 2019 Test 16 (a) | Article: 'Eating healthy food leads to a healthy life' |
| 2018 Test 4 | Match titles to a textbook contents page (information-handling) |