NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 8 Believe in Yourself (poem by Robert Langley) — Speaking Activity

Introduction — the meaning. A book’s cover tells you nothing reliable about the writing inside it. The proverb warns against forming an opinion of a person or a thing from its outward appearance — clothes, accent, looks, a first impression — because appearance is the part that has been arranged, and character is the part that has not.

Situation/Example. When Farhan joined our class in June he wore the same faded shirt every day and never spoke, and by the second week half the class had decided he was slow. In the Science practical he was paired with me. Within ten minutes he had spotted that our microscope slide was upside down, and he then explained the whole experiment more clearly than the textbook did. It turned out he had missed six months of school because his father was ill, and that he had read every issue of a science magazine at the town library in that time. What I had read as dullness was exhaustion; what I had read as silence was a boy who did not yet know anyone’s name.

Sample role play

Conclusion. What the saying teaches is not simply that first impressions can be wrong — it is that a first impression is made of the little we can see, and the little we can see is almost never the part that matters. The practical lesson is to postpone the verdict: give a person one real conversation before you decide who they are.

Introduction — the meaning. What a person does is better evidence of what they intend than what they say. Words are cheap and instantaneous; actions cost time and effort, and that cost is what makes them believable.

Situation/Example. Before the half-yearly exams, two of us in the hostel announced a new study plan. Vikram described his in detail at dinner every evening — the timetable, the highlighters, the app that would block his phone. Meghna said nothing at all, but she began going to the library at six in the morning. When the results came, Vikram’s marks were what they had always been; Meghna’s Maths had gone from 61 to 88. Nobody had heard her plan, because there was no plan to hear — there was only the six o’clock walk to the library, ninety times over.

Sample role play

Conclusion. The saying teaches something uncomfortable: talking about an intention can actually replace acting on it, because announcing a plan gives you some of the satisfaction of having carried it out. Irene Chua’s letter makes the same point in different words — people who “never got beyond just wishful thinking.” The test she proposes and the test this proverb proposes are identical: not what you say you will do, but what you have already begun to do.

Introduction — the meaning. The saying turns on two senses of the same word. When the situation (“the going”) becomes hard, strong-minded people (“the tough”) start moving. In other words, difficulty is exactly the condition that separates those who persist from those who stop — hardship does not weaken the resolute; it reveals them.

Situation/Example. Our group had chosen to build a working model of a rainwater harvesting system for the science exhibition. Four days before it, the tank leaked from a joint we could not seal, and one member said we should switch to a chart-paper poster instead. We stayed back on two afternoons, borrowed a different valve from the school workshop and rebuilt the joint twice. The model still leaked slightly on the day — and the judges gave us the second prize, one of them saying that ours was the only project whose makers could explain what had gone wrong and why.

Sample role play

Conclusion. What the experience taught me is that giving up almost never happens at the beginning, when everything is unclear — it happens at the moment of the third failure, which is usually the moment just before the problem becomes solvable. Perseverance is not stubbornness; it is staying long enough to find out what is actually wrong.