Picture two classmates who look almost identical — same height, same uniform — yet you would never confuse them. One is always first to help; the other is 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.
This topic has its own slice of grammar. The pronouns that fit here are the small family 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 will also learn to read and describe a bar graph. The writing tasks — a personality speech, a graph description, an essay — all flow from these three ideas.
Vidath's speech from the Grade 10 Pupil's Book is a spoken piece: it greets the audience, asks questions out loud, then answers them, and that question-and-answer rhythm is exactly what makes a speech feel alive. He begins with a personal spark — reading an article on personality made him wonder how his friends differ from him — then reaches the speech's central idea: just as a name identifies a person, so do their qualities and behaviours, because personality is a unique, organised pattern of behaviour and traits that shows in how a person behaves, feels and thinks.
Then he asks the big question directly: "From where do we get our personality?" — and answers it himself: partly by birth, and partly by the environment we live in. That is why people differ from one another, and why among the people we meet daily some are friendly, some shy, some helpful, some lazy.
Notice the technique: a speech that asks then answers pulls the listener along, because the human mind cannot help reaching for an answer once a question is hanging in the air. When you write a speech for Test 16, plant a question or two of your own — 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 we praise as determined we criticise as stubborn when we do not like it; confident and arrogant describe almost the same behaviour seen by a friend and by an enemy. Keeping the two columns side by side is a reminder that describing character is really about shades, not black and white.
| Positive traits | ambitious, brave, capable, determined, fearless, generous, honest, loyal, cheerful, hard-working, punctual, sociable, sensible, empathetic, optimistic, trustworthy, co-operative, diligent |
|---|---|
| Negative traits | arrogant, stingy, careless, untidy, wasteful, hot-tempered, selfish, shy, aggressive, oversensitive, dishonest, timid, jealous, stubborn, cruel, lazy |
When you describe a person honestly, mention three positives and one weakness. That small flaw is what makes the praise believable — a person who is only ever good reads like a cardboard cut-out, not a human being.
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 are 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 picture two faces, it is "each other".
| Wrong | Right |
|---|---|
| Sajini and Nimal helped one another. | Sajini and Nimal helped each other. (just two) |
| The four sons fought each other. | The four sons fought one another. (more than two) |
| They love each others. | They love each other. (never add -s) |
One slip almost everyone makes is 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 before the s: "the students copied each other's notes", "one another's opinions".
Sometimes the person doing the action and the person it lands on are the very same person — "I cut myself" means I did the cutting and I got cut. For that, English bends the pronoun back on itself like a mirror, adding -self for one person or -selves for many. That is why they are called reflexive: the action reflects straight back to the subject.
The test is simple: ask whether the action came 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).
| Subject | Reflexive | Example |
|---|---|---|
| I | myself | I taught myself Korean. |
| you (singular) | yourself | Take care of yourself. |
| he / she / it | himself / herself / itself | He cut himself while shaving. |
| we | ourselves | We enjoyed ourselves at the picnic. |
| you (plural) | yourselves | Help yourselves to the snacks. |
| they | themselves | The cats washed themselves. |
The trap is in 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 is no such thing, because "we" is always plural, so it must be 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 do not 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: "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…" (a straight comparison). Pour these into the Test 14 shape: a title sentence, then the most, then the middle, then the least, then one closing insight. That closing insight — what the numbers suggest — is what lifts a description from a list into real writing.
This short poem uses the very reciprocal pronouns from this unit, but turns them sour. The poet accuses modern society — himself included — of chasing material glitter and losing "grace" and "human values". The bitter joke sits inside one line: "we are pushing each other" instead of helping one another. What should describe people caring for one another now describes people shoving past one another — that is how a poem makes its point, by twisting an ordinary phrase until you feel its edge. The repeated close, "we, we, and only we", thuds like a drumbeat, driving home the poem's accusation of selfishness.
Typical exam questions on this poem ask what the poet values most (quote the lines), what "we are pushing each other, we have no human values" tells us about modern society, and which human values we may be losing.
A model personality speech, "Who I Am, Really" (about 108 words), shows the clever move that separates a good answer from an average one: it never just claims a quality — it proves each one with a tiny example. Anyone can write "I am hard-working"; what convinces the listener is "when I take up a project I see it to the end". A claim plus its evidence is twice as strong as the claim alone. The weakness is admitted honestly ("impatience") but paired with a fix ("reading one page of a novel each night instead of scrolling on my phone"), which turns a flaw into a sign of self-awareness — exactly what examiners reward. The shape: name and class, three quality-plus-example pairs, one honest weakness, a warm closing ambition.
A model bar-graph answer describing personality qualities in a class (generous 14, ambitious 12, capable 10, brave 8, determined 6, fearless 4) follows the same five-line shape: a title sentence names the chart, then the bars are climbed down in order from maximum (generosity) through the middle group to the minimum (fearless), and the closing paragraph asks what the numbers mean — "the majority of friends are described in soft terms… this suggests our class values kindness and ambition more than physical courage." Every required comparison phrase is used naturally rather than bolted on, and that closing insight is what separates a strong answer from an average one.
| Task | Official word count |
|---|---|
| Personality paragraph (Test 8) | 50–60 words — person → two qualities → one example |
| Speech / bar-graph description (Test 14) | ~100 words |
| Personality essay (Test 16) | ~200 words — hook → three qualities with a concrete story for each → one weakness → warm close |
Reciprocal and reflexive pronouns are near-guaranteed in the fill-in passages of Tests 11 to 13, and bar-graph description is a fixed slot in Test 14. Personality vocabulary also feeds the comprehension passages and the character essays, so this one unit earns marks in several places at once.
| Past-paper test | What was tested |
|---|---|
| 2015 Test 2 | Match qualities to people (Chanura clever, Gayan excellent artist…) |
| 2016 Test 14 (b) | Bar graph description — leisure activities of students |
| 2017 Test 13 | "Under Ground" poem — recognising mood and meaning |
| 2017 Test 7 | Comprehension about a person ("the 100-year-old lady") |
| Test 11 / 12 / 13 | Reciprocal & reflexive pronouns in fill-in passages |