NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 4 Sitting together after the exploration — Discuss your findings

Each team reports what it wrote down. Give numbers and places, not general statements.

Sample answer — our class's findings:

• Water Watchers: “We found 4 leaking taps — two in the boys' toilet, one near the kitchen and one in the garden. The garden tap had been dripping for so long that a green patch of algae had grown under it. The overhead tank has no lid.”
• Electricity Savers: “At lunch break, 6 fans and 5 tube lights were running in empty rooms. The corridor lights stay on all day. Classes 5A and 5B are bright enough without lights until three o'clock.”
• Waste Warriors: “Most litter is behind the classrooms and along the playground wall. Nearly all of it is wrappers. There are only 3 dustbins in the whole school, all near the office, and none near the playground.”
• Green Guardians: “14 trees and 11 pots. Two of the five saplings planted last year have died because nobody watered them in the summer holidays. There is no compost pit.”
• Traffic Trackers: “At 2:45 p.m. the road in front of the gate is completely blocked. There is no zebra crossing and no ‘School Ahead’ sign. In ten minutes we counted 11 vehicles that did not slow down.”

“Concerned” means it worried you — you felt that something was not right and ought to be put right.

Sample answer: “Two things worried us. The first was the traffic at the gate. There is no zebra crossing, and small children from Class 1 and 2 cross between the parked autos where no driver can see them. We felt that an accident could happen any day. The second was the uncovered water tank. Anything can fall into it — dust, leaves, a bird — and that is the water we all drink. We also felt bad about the two saplings that had dried up, because our class had planted them last year and then forgotten them during the holidays.”

Sample answer: “The biggest surprise was how much water one small drip wastes. The tap in the garden was only dripping — not running. But when we put a glass under it, the glass was full in 6 minutes. We worked it out: that is 10 glasses in an hour and about 240 glasses in a day, from one tap that looked like it was doing nothing at all.

The second surprise was the dustbins. We had always thought children in our school were careless. But when we looked at the map, we saw that all three bins were near the office and there was not a single bin anywhere near the playground — which is exactly where all the litter was. So the children were not careless. The bins were simply in the wrong place.

The third surprise was pleasant. Under the big neem tree it was noticeably cooler than in the open courtyard just twenty steps away.”

Sample answer: “We felt proud of several things. Our school has 14 grown trees, and the big neem near the playground is older than our school building — visitors always say how green our campus looks. We felt proud of Ramesh bhaiya, who sweeps the corridors: he starts before we arrive so that our school is clean every single morning, and he had never been thanked, so our class thanked him in the assembly.

We also felt proud of ourselves. We had walked past that dripping garden tap every day for a year without seeing it. Once we started looking properly, we found it in five minutes — and it was repaired the next week because we wrote it down and gave the list to the office.”