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 is the quiet idea behind this unit: success is not a single moment, it is 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, as in "Rasuni said she would become a scientist." It is the tense step-back from Unit 1, stretched further here. The writing task is the biography: turning a list of bare facts into flowing past-simple prose.
In the Grade 10 Pupil's Book role play, a teacher asks the class what a statement about success means, and three students give three different answers. Rasuni takes it to mean that success requires hard work. Ganeshan adds that no one else will build the road of success for you. Sazi adds a third layer: successful people had to work on their own rather than rely on others.
Notice that none of the three students is wrong — they are layers of the same truth. When an essay question asks "What is success?", this is the move that earns marks: do not 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.
A handful of quotations are worth holding in memory, because a well-placed quotation does two jobs at once in an essay — it proves you have read, and it lets a famous voice make your point more powerfully than you could alone. Drop one into your opening or your conclusion, where it lands hardest, not buried in the middle.
| Saying | Source |
|---|---|
| "Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do." | Pelé |
| "Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going." | Sam Levenson |
| "Slow and steady wins the race." | Aesop |
| "Where there is a will, there is a way." | Proverb |
| "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." | Tim Notke |
When you tell a friend what someone else said, you usually do not 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 is 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: the verb steps back a tense, the pronoun changes to fit who is now speaking, and the time and place words step back from "here and now" to "there and then".
Questions need one extra piece of 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 is the part everyone forgets: "Are you tired?" becomes "He asked if I was tired," and "What time is the meeting?" becomes "She asked what time the meeting was" — never "what time was the meeting".
For commands and requests, drop the quotation marks and use told/asked + person + to + bare verb: "Sit down, please" becomes "The teacher asked us to sit down," and "Don't be late" becomes "My mother told me not to be late."
One classic trap is worth burning into memory: say and tell are not twins. You tell a person, but you say a thing, or say something to someone. "He said me" is wrong; it is "he told me" or "he said to me".
Activity 8 of the unit gives bare notes on Charlie Chaplin's life — he started work at nine, performed on stage, became a stage actor and comedian, went to the United States, joined the Fred Karno Company at nineteen, entered the cinema world in 1913, became famous, turned independent film producer in 1917, made silent films including The Kid (1921), A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928), and passed away on 25th December 1977 at the age of 88.
The craft of biography is this: the notes are a heap of bricks, and writing is the mortar between them. In the model paragraph, the facts arrive in time order — nine years old, then nineteen, then 1913, then 1917, then his death — every verb stays in past simple (started, became, went, joined), and small joining phrases such as "as a young man" and "he soon became so famous that" and "leaving behind" turn a list into a life. Same facts, but now they flow.
The full biography shape to follow for any person: full name, date and place of birth; a family or early-life sentence; schooling or first work; major achievements with dates; one obstacle overcome; and, if relevant, the date of death and a closing legacy line — all told in past simple throughout.
The same recipe applied to a second life: Dr. Christopher William Wijekoon Kannangara was born on 13th October 1884 at Randombe in Ambalangoda, first worked as a teacher, and qualified as a lawyer in 1910. In 1919 he became a founder member of the Ceylon National Congress, and from 1931 to 1947 he served as Minister of Education, during which he introduced the Free Education Act of 1945 — a reform that opened school doors to every child regardless of caste, wealth or religion. He is remembered today as the father of free education in Sri Lanka.
Run your eye down this model and you see the same rules at work: the facts march in time order, the verbs never leave past simple, and the bare note "father of free education" is lifted into a real closing line. The one extra touch that turns a pass into a top mark is a small explanation glued onto the most important fact — not just what happened, but why it mattered.
A short list of names recurs in comprehension passages and general-knowledge questions on this topic, so it helps to have one fact-sentence ready for each. Dr. C.W.W. Kannangara is remembered as the father of free education in Sri Lanka, through the Free Education Act of 1945. Lasith Malinga is a Sri Lankan fast bowler known for taking three hat-tricks in Cricket World Cup matches. Sir Arthur C. Clarke was a science-fiction writer and inventor who made Sri Lanka his home for 52 years. Madam Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world's first elected female prime minister, in 1960. Sister Anula Mendis is remembered as the first Sri Lankan nun to serve as a missionary in Africa.
Any of these lives can be turned into a 100-word biography using the exact shape practised above — birth, background, achievement, obstacle, legacy.
A 200-word article on a personality one admires, such as Mother Teresa, shows the difference between a 100-word life and a fuller article. The facts stay in time order and the verbs stay in past simple, but the writer now slows down on the parts that matter — a vivid early-life hook, the work itself (founding the Missionaries of Charity), one named obstacle ("told the work was too small to change anything"), and a personal reason for admiring her. The strongest move is ending on the subject's own quotation and echoing it in the last line, which lets the subject speak for herself and leaves the reader with one idea to carry away. Do not just list a life; choose the one moment that explains the person.
| Task | Official word count |
|---|---|
| Notice (Test 6) | 40–50 words |
| Short paragraph (Test 8) | 50–60 words |
| Biography / letter (Test 14) | ~100 words — use the notes in order, stay in past simple |
| Success essay (Test 16) | ~200 words — hook → three reasons → quote → close |
Reported speech is one of the most reliable grammar tasks on the paper, with Test 10 testing it almost every year, and the biographical comprehension and "person I admire" essay come round again and again. The past-simple storytelling practised here is the engine behind all of them.
| Past-paper test | What was tested |
|---|---|
| 2016 Test 11 | Fill the blanks: Thomas Alva Edison biography |
| 2017 Test 10 | Convert direct → reported speech (Ravi, Pasan, Naveen at a movie) |
| 2020 Test 10 | Form questions about Arthur C. Clarke (biography) |
| 2019 Test 7 | Comprehension on Sanduni's birthday — past-simple biography style |
| 2017 Test 16 (a) | Article: 'The person I admire most' |