Beyond My Looks

الشرح

What you will learn

- Reading: follow informational texts about personal identity and separate a person's qualities from their appearance. - Listening: follow an interview about respecting personal identity and catch the speaker's reasons. - Speaking: talk about personal qualities and values, and ask about somebody else's. - Language: use the present perfect in both its active and passive forms, and tell since from for. - Writing: write a descriptive paragraph about how your values shape your identity.

The Question Nobody Asks First

When a new pupil joins a class, the first three questions are almost always the same: where are you from, which school were you at, and what does your father do. None of them is about the person. They are about the background standing behind the person, which is easier to ask about and much less interesting. Hala noticed this in her first week at a new school and decided to answer the fourth question instead - the one nobody had asked. When somebody said where are you from, she said she was the sort of person who could not leave an argument alone until it was fair. It made the conversation awkward for about ten seconds. By the end of the term she had three close friends, and all three of them could describe her character before they could name her old school. Identity is not the label on the outside of the box. It is what the box turns out to contain.