NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 6 Closing questions — Let us reflect

Choose one thing that changed your mind, and say what you had believed before. That is what makes a surprise a surprise.

Here are the biggest surprises in the chapter. Any of them is a good answer.

Sample answer: The living root bridges of Meghalaya surprised me the most. I had always thought a bridge is something people build out of stone or iron, and that from the day it is finished it slowly grows weaker. But here the people do not build the bridge — they grow it. They guide the roots of a tree across a stream, and go on twisting new roots in year after year. It takes fifteen or twenty years before anyone can walk on it, which means the person who starts it may never use it. It is made for the grandchildren. And because it is alive, it keeps getting stronger instead of weaker. That is the opposite of everything I thought about bridges.

Name one place from the chapter, say why you picked it, and list three things you would actually do there. A list of three real things is worth more than a page of praise.

Sample answer: I would most like to visit the Sundarbans. I would go in a small boat along the narrow creeks, early in the morning when the tide is low, because that is when the breathing roots stand out of the mud like a field of pencils. I would look for tiger pug marks on the wet bank — not for the tiger itself, because that would be dangerous. I would ask a honey collector how he finds a wild bees' nest, and whether he really wears a mask on the back of his head. And I would count how many different birds I could see from the boat in one hour, and write the list in my notebook.

Pick the place in the chapter that your own area is least like, and compare six things: the land, the water, the weather, the houses, the work and the wildlife. The differences teach you more than the likenesses.

How to build your answer, step by step.

1. Write the name of your village, town or city, and the state.
2. Choose one place from the chapter — the islands, the Sundarbans, the Northeast or the Western Ghats.
3. Fill the six rows of the table below for both.
4. End with two sentences: one big similarity, one big difference.

Sample answer — a child in a village in western Rajasthan, compared with the Sundarbans:

The two closing sentences: The big difference is water. In my village every drop is saved and a well is precious; in the Sundarbans there is water everywhere but it is salty, so drinking water is precious there too. The big similarity is that in both places people have built their houses, chosen their work and made their festivals to fit the weather they were given — and in both places they look after the plants that keep their land in place, the khejri here and the mangrove there.

Look at the eight pictures on page 110, from top to bottom, and read each feature carefully. Here is the matching, done.

The answers in the order the features are printed:

A little more about each one:

• Starfish — it is not a fish. It has no brain and no blood, and it walks on hundreds of tiny tube feet. If a crab bites off an arm, it grows a new one.
• Seahorse — a real fish, but it swims upright and slowly. It curls its tail round a weed to hold on. The father, not the mother, carries the eggs in a pouch.
• Sea turtle — it swims thousands of kilometres, then comes back to the same beach where it hatched, digs a pit in the sand at night and lays its eggs. On the coast of Odisha, olive ridley turtles come ashore in their thousands.
• Octopus — eight arms covered with suckers, and no bones at all, so it can squeeze through a very small hole. It changes colour in a moment to match a rock.
• Clownfish — the anemone's arms sting other fish, but a coating on the clownfish's skin keeps it safe. It gets a guarded home; the anemone gets cleaned and defended.
• Coral — each coral is a tiny animal that builds a hard stony cup round itself. Millions of them together make a reef.
• Jellyfish — mostly water, with no brain, no heart and no bones. Never touch one, even a dead one on the sand.
• Dolphin — a mammal, not a fish. It must come up to breathe air, it feeds its babies milk, it lives in a group and it finds things by making clicks and listening for the echo. India's Ganges river dolphin is our National Aquatic Animal.

Mangroves are the only trees that can live in salty, muddy, tide-washed land — and they hold the coast together while doing it.

1. They can live in salt water. Salt kills most plants. Mangroves block most of the salt at their roots, and push out what does get in through their leaves. You can sometimes see salt crystals on a mangrove leaf.
2. Their roots breathe air. Sea mud has almost no air in it. So mangroves grow thin roots that stick straight up out of the mud, like pencils, and take in air through tiny holes. These are the stick-like things Shanti saw.
3. They stand on stilts. Arching stilt roots lift the trunk above the water and grip the soft mud, so the tree is not knocked over by the tide.
4. They hold the land in place. The tangle of roots traps mud and stops waves from washing the shore away.
5. They are a wall against storms. A thick mangrove belt breaks the force of a cyclone or a big wave before it reaches the villages behind.
6. They are a nursery for the sea. Fish, prawns and crabs lay eggs among the roots, where the young are safe. Much of the coastal fish catch begins here.
7. Their seeds sprout on the tree. Many mangrove seeds start growing while still hanging on the parent, then drop point-first and stick straight into the mud. In a place washed twice a day by the tide, an ordinary seed would simply float away.
8. They feed and employ people. Honey, fish, crabs, wood and work all come out of a mangrove forest.

They take what they need from the place they live in, they take it in a way that lets it grow back, and they make their houses, work and festivals fit the land instead of fighting it. Every place in this chapter shows the same idea in a different form.

The five habits that come up again and again:

1. Build with what grows there. Bamboo in the wet hills, mud in the dry plains, wood and thatch by the coast.
2. Take only as much as grows back. Honey but not the whole hive; branches but not the whole tree.
3. Make room for the animals. An elephant beside the field, a hornbill on the village tree, a tiger in the same forest you work in.
4. Follow the seasons. Festivals fall at sowing and harvest; fishing stops in the breeding season.
5. Pass the knowledge on. The root bridge, the tiger mask, the names of the mango kinds — all of it is taught to children before the elders are gone.

A collage is a picture made by sticking many smaller pictures together on one sheet. The trick is to arrange them so they tell one story, instead of scattering them anywhere.

Step 1 — Collect your pictures. Old newspapers and magazines, calendars, travel leaflets, sweet-box wrappers, used postcards and stamps, seed packets. You can also draw the ones you cannot find. Nothing new needs to be bought.

Step 2 — Sort them into six groups. Use these headings, and try to take pictures from all corners of India.

Step 3 — Lay it out before you paste any of it.

1. Take a full chart paper. Write the title lightly in pencil at the top: Vibrant India.
2. Move all the pictures around on the paper first. Do not use glue yet.
3. Put one big picture in the middle — it is the heart of the collage. An outline map of India works very well.
4. Arrange the rest around it, roughly where they belong on the map: Northeast pictures top right, island pictures bottom right, Western Ghats pictures on the left.
5. Overlap the edges a little, so there are no ugly white gaps.
6. Now paste, working from the middle outwards. Use a thin, even layer of glue.
7. Write a small label beside each picture — the place and one word about it.
8. Add a border of small coloured paper triangles, or a strip of saffron, white and green along one edge.

Step 4 — Give it a sentence. Under the title, write one line of your own. For example: Many landscapes, many languages, many festivals — one country.

Sample answer — how one child's collage came out: In the middle I pasted a big outline map of India. Around it I put a snow mountain at the top, a camel in the desert on the left, a fishing boat and coconut trees at the bottom, and a mangrove creek with a tiger on the right. Below the map I made a row of six people in the dress of six different states. Along the bottom I put a strip of food pictures — rice and fish curry, dal-baati, idli, a sadya on a banana leaf. In one corner I pasted a picture of a rocket, because India is not only old, it is also new. My line at the top was: Every corner is different, and all of it is one home.