NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 1 Visit a pond, lake or aquarium

Q1.

Visit a local water body like a pond, lake or an aquarium with your teacher or parents, and observe life in and around the water body. 1. Based on your observations, complete the following table. (Given rows: Fish — round mouth facing upwards — fins; Pond heron — long and pointed — thin legs.)

Name of the Bird or Animal	Mouth or Beaks	Movement through Legs, Feet, Fins
Fish	Round mouth facing upwards	Fins
Pond heron	Long and pointed	Thin legs

The table printed with Activity 8 on page 17 — the first two rows are the book’s own, with its two rough diagrams; three rows are left blank for your own observations.

Answer

How to make the visit useful

Go only with a teacher or a parent. Stay well back from the edge of the water.
Do not touch or disturb any plant or animal. Just watch.
Stand still and quiet for two minutes first — the birds come back when you are quiet.
For each creature, note two things: what its mouth or beak looks like, and what body part it uses to move.
Draw a quick outline in your notebook. It does not have to be beautiful — it has to show the shape.

Sample answer — the table filled in with animals shown in the pond picture on pages 14–15 and in the Information Card on page 16. The first two rows are the book's own.

Name of the Bird or Animal	Mouth or Beaks	Movement through Legs, Feet, Fins	Rough Diagram
Fish	Round mouth facing upwards	Fins	Long body, pointed at both ends, with fins and a tail
Pond heron	Long and pointed	Thin legs	Tall bird standing in shallow water on stick-like legs
Frog	Wide mouth, with a long sticky tongue to catch insects	Four legs; long webbed hind feet for swimming and jumping	Round body, big eyes on top, folded back legs
Freshwater turtle	Small blunt mouth with hard horny jaws instead of teeth	Four short webbed feet, used like paddles	Dome-shaped shell with a head and four feet coming out
Kingfisher	Long, straight, dagger-like beak for spearing fish	Very short legs; it flies and dives, it does not wade	Small round bird on a reed, with a very long beak

Rough diagrams like these are enough. Draw the shape, the mouth and the moving part.

What to notice: each mouth matches the food, and each moving part matches the place. The heron's long pointed beak is a pair of tongs for grabbing fish; its thin legs let it stand in shallow water without sinking. The kingfisher's dagger beak is for a fast dive. The turtle's webbed feet are paddles. The fish's upward-facing mouth is handy for taking food floating at the surface.

If you cannot visit a water body: watch an aquarium in a shop or a school, or look carefully at the pond picture on pages 14–15 of your book. You can see a frog, fish, a turtle, a water snake, dragonflies, water striders, a kingfisher, a pond heron and other water birds in it.

Q2.

2. Draw the plants that you saw during the visit and label them with their local name. (Table: Types — Names — Local Name; the first row gives ‘Lily’.)

Answer

Water plants sort themselves into three groups by where they keep their leaves and their roots. Here is the table filled in. Write your own local names in the last column — they change from place to place.

Types	Names	Local Name (sample)
Plants floating (above water)	Lily · Water hyacinth · Duckweed	Kumudini · Jalkumbhi · Lemna
Plants under water	Hydrilla · Vallisneria (tape grass)	Sivar / Jal-sivar
Plants whose roots are in the water bed, but are seen above the water	Lotus · Reeds (cattail) · Water chestnut	Kamal · Narkul / Patera · Singhara

How to draw each one:

Floating plant. Draw the water line first. Then draw round flat leaves sitting on the line, and short hair-like roots hanging below.
Underwater plant. Draw a thin stem rising from the pond bed with narrow leaves all along it, all of it below the water line.
Rooted plant seen above water. Draw roots in the mud at the bottom, a long stalk going up through the water, and a leaf or flower standing above the water line.

Why the three groups exist: Every green plant needs sunlight. A floating plant gets it by keeping its leaves on the surface. A rooted plant like the lotus gets it by pushing a long stalk up until the leaf is above the water. An underwater plant like hydrilla manages with the weaker light that reaches down into the water, so its leaves are thin and narrow.

From the Information Card, page 16: reeds are the tall grass-like edge plants; lotus and water lily are called rooted floating — their flowers float while their roots stay in the pond bed; water hyacinth is free-floating and spreads very fast over a pond.

NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 1 Visit a pond, lake or aquarium — Activity 8