NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 1 Who Eats Whom? — Activity 10
Book page 19 Updated on2026-09-19
Q1.
Who Eats Whom? — A River Food Chain Game. Distribute slips of paper to students. Each student writes what they choose to be (for example, small fish, big fish, frog, bird, human, crocodile, otter, etc.). Ask the students to think about what they eat, and who eats them. Use a string to connect the students who depend on each other for food.
Answer
How to play, step by step:
Every child takes a slip and writes one river living thing on it — water plant, small fish, big fish, frog, dragonfly, pond heron, kingfisher, water snake, crocodile, otter, human. Pin the slip on your shirt.
Everyone stands in a big circle.
Each child thinks about two questions: What do I eat? and Who eats me?
One child holds the end of a ball of string and passes it to someone they eat, or to someone who eats them. That child holds the string and passes it on again.
Keep going until everybody is holding the string. You now have a web of string across the circle — this is the food web of the river.
Now the test. Ask one child — say, all the small fish — to let go of the string. See how many other strings go loose.
Sample food chains you can use in the game:
Water plants → small fish → big fish → pond heron → (nothing eats the heron here) Water plants → tadpole → frog → water snake → kingfisher Tiny water insects → dragonfly → frog → crocodile Water plants → small fish → big fish → human
A simple river food chain. Every animal in it depends on the one before it.
What the game teaches: No living thing in a river feeds itself alone. The plants make their own food using sunlight. The small animals eat the plants. The bigger animals eat the smaller ones. So the energy of the Sun travels along the whole chain. Because the chains cross one another, the whole thing is really a food web, not a single line.
Q2.
Discuss what would happen if one animal disappears (for example, what if all the fish are gone?).
Answer
If all the fish disappeared, the whole river would be thrown out of balance. Some animals would go hungry, some would grow too many in number, and people would lose food and work.
Follow the chain both ways.
Who is affected
What happens
Why
Pond heron, kingfisher, crocodile, otter, water snake
Go hungry; they move away to another water body or their numbers fall
Fish were their main food. Nothing is left to eat.
Water insects, mosquito larvae, tadpoles
Their numbers grow very fast
The fish used to eat them. With no fish, nothing keeps their number down. More mosquitoes can mean more illness.
Water plants and algae
May grow over the whole pond and choke it
The tiny creatures that graze on them get eaten by fish. Remove the fish and the whole chain wobbles.
People who fish
Lose their food and their earning
Fishing families depend on the river directly.
The water itself
Gets dirtier
Fish eat dead bits and keep the water clean. Without them the water becomes smelly and unhealthy.
Sample answer for the discussion: “If all the fish were gone, the birds and animals that eat fish would have nothing left to eat, so they would leave the river or die. At the same time the insects that fish used to eat would increase very fast. Fishermen would lose their work. One missing link breaks the whole chain — so protecting one animal really means protecting all of them.”
What makes fish disappear? Throwing waste and plastic into rivers, letting factory water and drain water flow in untreated, and catching too many fish. Keeping a river clean is the way to keep its food chain whole.