Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
The person I'd like to describe is my grandmother, who's just turned eighty-two and still lives on her own two streets away from us, which tells you something about her already. She spent most of her working life as a seamstress, running a small alterations shop out of the front room of her house, and she raised four children more or less by herself after my grandfather died young. What she's done isn't dramatic in any obvious sense — she didn't run a company or win any awards — but she kept a family financially afloat through some genuinely difficult decades using nothing but a sewing machine and an enormous amount of stubbornness. She's what I'd call quietly formidable: soft-spoken, almost self-effacing when she talks about herself, but completely unshakeable when it comes to actually getting things done. She still mends her own clothes rather than replacing them, still gets up early out of habit rather than necessity, and has this dry sense of humour that catches you off guard because she delivers it so deadpan. The reason I admire her, more than anything, is that resilience with her was never performative — she never talked about how hard things were, she just quietly did what needed doing and moved on to the next thing. I think about that a lot when I'm tempted to make a fuss over comparatively minor setbacks in my own life. She's the standard I measure myself against, even though I doubt I'll ever match her.