NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 1 Why rivers go to different seas — Discuss

Because the land of India is not flat. It is high in some places and low in others, and every river simply runs down the slope it is born on — just like the mustard seeds ran down the folds of the crumpled paper.

Think of India as a very big sheet of crumpled paper.

1. Along the western edge of the peninsula there is a long high wall of hills called the Western Ghats.
2. West of the Ghats the land drops steeply, and the Arabian Sea is close by.
3. East of the Ghats the land slopes down gently for a very long way, all the way to the Bay of Bengal.
4. So rivers that start in the Western Ghats and face east — the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri — travel right across the country and empty into the Bay of Bengal.
5. The Narmada and the Tapti are different. They run westward through long narrow valleys between hill ranges, and those valleys slope towards the west, so these two rivers reach the Arabian Sea.
6. In the north, the Ganga, the Yamuna and the Brahmaputra come down from the Himalaya. The plain below slopes towards the south-east, so they too go to the Bay of Bengal.

Sample answer for the class discussion: “In Activity 6 all the seeds started from the same high point, but they did not all go the same way. Each seed followed the fold it fell into. India's land is like that crumpled paper. The Western Ghats are the high fold near the west coast. Most of the land slopes east from there, so most rivers run east to the Bay of Bengal. Only rivers that happen to lie in west-sloping valleys, like the Narmada and the Tapti, reach the Arabian Sea.”