Contents

Biography

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Biography

Setting

• Name of person
• Time he / she lived
• Country of origin
• Profession

Event 1 Early life

Event 2 1st important thing they did

Event 3 2nd important thing they did

Conclusion
Why was the person important?
What impact did they have on the world?

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Martin Luther King Name

Setting Profession

Martin Luther King was a Black clergyman whose ideas helped Americans accept
that black and white people were equal.
He was born in the south of the USA in 1929 at a time when black people were
treated very badly. They were paid much less than white people and often could
not eat in the same place as whites or travel in the same buses.
Country of origin

Early life

Martin Luther King was a very clever boy who went to college and trained as a
clergyman. From the beginning, he preached that all children were equal. In
Alabama black people were only allowed to sit on special seats at the back of
buses. In 1955 he encouraged them to boycott the buses and forced the bus
company to change the rules.

Important event

In 1963 he planned a march to Washington to celebrate the one hundredth

anniversary of the abolition of slavery. As he became famous, he encouraged
more and more black people to ‘strike’ peacefully to demand their rights. This
made him so unpopular with white racists that in 1968 he was shot.

Second important event

Despite his early death at the age of 39, Martin Luther King is remembered as
one of America’s greatest men. Without him black Americans might never have
won the freedoms they have today. He is so respected in America that his
birthday is a public holiday.
1 3

Conclusion

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Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King was a Black clergyman whose ideas helped Americans accept
that black and white people were equal.
He was born in the south of the USA in 1929 at a time when black people were
treated very badly. They were paid much less than white people and often could
not eat in the same place as whites or travel in the same buses.

Martin Luther King was a very clever boy who went to college and trained as a
clergyman. From the beginning, he preached that all children were equal. In
Alabama black people were only allowed to sit on special seats at the back of
buses. In 1955 he encouraged them to boycott the buses and forced the bus
company to change the rules.

In 1963 he planned a march to Washington to celebrate the one hundredth

anniversary of the abolition of slavery. As he became famous, he encouraged
more and more black people to ‘strike’ peacefully to demand their rights. This
made him so unpopular with white racists that in 1968 he was shot.

Despite his early death at the age of 39, Martin Luther King is remember ed as
one of America’s greatest men. Without him black Americans might never have
won the freedoms they have today. He is so respected in America that his
birthday is a public holiday.

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John Travolta

John Travolta was born in 1954, the youngest of six

children. His mother taught acting and often he would go
with her to classes. He grew up wanting to be a star one
day.

He left school at the age of 16 and at first found it very

hard to get jobs. He had a number of small parts in plays
and appeared in a Pepsi advert. In 1975 he was lucky
enough to get a part in a T.V. show in which he played
the leader of a street gang. At last people started to
notice him.

Eventually he was offered the star parts in two films,

‘Saturday Night Fever’ and ‘Grease’. Suddenly everyone had
heard about him and lots of boys copied his style of dancing.
He became very rich.

After ‘Grease’ he went through a very bad patch. His mother

died, he became very depressed and overweight. Most
people thought he was finished. Recently though he has
begun to make a recovery and has played the lead in a wide
variety of films including ‘Pulp Fiction’.

It is too early to tell if John Travolta will be remembered as a

great film star. He is still working and his greatest film maybe
ahead of him. Certainly at the moment, most people will
remember him best singing and dancing with Olivia Newton-
John in Grease.

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Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was actually born in

Florence in 1862, the daughter of a rich
English couple who enjoyed travelling. It was
a time when upper class girls were not
expected to do anything except wait for a man
to propose to them.
Florence Nightingale rebelled against this.
She desperately wanted to be a nurse at a time when most nurses
were thought of as dirty, drunken and unreliable. Despite her
parents opposition, in 1851 she went to Kaiserswerth in Germany
to learn about nursing in a religious community. Eventually she
became matron of a very small charity hospital in London.

In 1884 Britain declared war on Russia and Florence saw her

chance. She volunteered to take a group of nurses out to Scutari
in Turkey to nurse soldiers wounded in battle. Before she arrived,
soldiers were dying in thousands because the army had made no
proper plans for hospitals. She managed to cut the death rate
enormously by ensuring that patients were kept clean and warm
and were fed properly. This may seem obvious to us but in the
19th century this made her famous almost overnight.

The war destroyed her own health and she was never well again,
but she still managed to make herself an expert on hospitals of the
world and her books and reports were enormously influential. She
even pioneered the use of statistics and may have invented pie
charts.

Almost single-handedly, Florence Nightingale created the modern

nurse. It is thanks to her that modern nurses are the well-trained
and respected professionals that they are today. She also set an
example of what women can do. The fact that women are
succeeding in every profession owes a lot to her.
Contents

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 Biography Check List
My first paragraph contains:-

The subject’s name

The subject’s profession
The subject’s country of origin
The period in which they lived

My second paragraph contains information

about the subject’s early life

My third paragraph describes an important

event in the subject’s life

My fourth paragraph describes another

important event in the subject’s life

My fifth paragraph sets out what is important

about the subject

I have used capital letters and full stops

I have checked my spelling

Contents

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