NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 3 Snow, hail and precipitation — THINK ABOUT IT
Book page 43 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
What is snow?
Answer
Snow is precipitation of water in a solid state — water that reaches the ground from the atmosphere not as liquid drops but as soft white ice crystals.
Water vapour rises into the sky and cools
If the air is above freezing → the vapour condenses into drops → rain
If the air is cold enough (below freezing) → it turns straight into ice crystals → snow
If drops are tossed up and down inside a storm cloud → they freeze in layers → hail
Rain, snow and hail are all precipitation
The same water leaves the same cloud in three different forms. What decides the form is the temperature of the air it falls through.
Where you can see snow in India: in the Himalayan regions — Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. In the rest of India, most precipitation is rain and hail, so many students may never have seen snow.
Why snow matters far beyond the mountains: at lower altitudes the snow melts every summer and turns into the water that feeds our rivers; at very high altitudes it never melts, leaving peaks permanently snow-capped. So the wheat grown in a Punjab field in May is partly drinking snow that fell on a Himalayan slope months earlier.
Tell them apart:snow is soft, light and falls quietly in flakes, mostly in winter; hailstones are hard, heavy pellets that come down suddenly with a thunderstorm and can bruise crops. Both are frozen water — but snow is formed gently, hail violently.