NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 4 Don't Miss Out — In-text Questions
Book page 65 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
In the timeline given on pages 62 and 63 (Fig. 4.3), can you mark the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE?
Answer
Yes — it falls exactly on the 8000 BCE mark, which is already printed on the timeline.
How to work it out. Millenniums BCE are counted beginning from 1 BCE and going backwards, in blocks of 1,000 years:
Millennium BCE
Years it covers
1st millennium BCE
1000 BCE – 1 BCE
2nd millennium BCE
2000 BCE – 1001 BCE
3rd millennium BCE
3000 BCE – 2001 BCE
…
…
8th millennium BCE
8000 BCE – 7001 BCE
nth millennium BCE runs from (n × 1000) BCE to ((n – 1) × 1000 + 1) BCE
For n = 8: from 8 × 1000 = 8000 BCE down to (7 × 1000 + 1) = 7001 BCE
Its beginning — the earliest of those years — is 8000 BCE
Millenniums laid out as blocks of 1,000 years. The 8th millennium BCE is the highlighted block; its beginning is the 8000 BCE line, which is already a labelled mark on Fig. 4.3.
Where to put your pencil on Fig. 4.3: on page 63 the bar is marked 12,000 BCE, 10,000 BCE, 8000 BCE, 6000 BCE, 4000 BCE, 2000 BCE and 2000 CE. Draw your line straight down at the 8000 BCE mark and label it “beginning of the 8th millennium BCE”. On the book's timeline this is close to where pottery technology in the Indian Subcontinent and the first settlements and beginning of agriculture are placed.
Tip: for BCE, “beginning” means the year with the bigger number, because BCE years count backwards. The 8th millennium BCE begins at 8000 BCE and ends at 7001 BCE — the opposite of what feels natural at first.
A small slip in the book: on page 65 the millennium entry reads “specific centuries are counted every 1,000 years from the year 1 CE”. It clearly means “specific millenniums”. The rule itself is right — the word is a printing slip.
Q2.
Do you know how calendars have been traditionally made in India?
Answer
Yes — many Indian calendars are luni-solar: they use the positions of the sun and the moon together to define the months of the year, instead of counting a fixed number of days the way the Gregorian calendar does.
The book that carries all this is the pañchānga.
What a pañchānga is
What it contains
What it is used for
A book of tables listing the days of each month along with related astronomical data
Positions of the sun and moon; predictions of solar and lunar eclipses; times of sunrise and sunset
Fixing the dates and timings of festivals, choosing auspicious times, and even weather predictions for the year
Why the sun and the moon: the moon gives a neat month (about 29½ days) but twelve of those fall about 11 days short of a solar year, so the seasons would drift. Indian calendars solve this by adding an extra month from time to time (the adhika māsa). That is why a festival such as Diwali or Holi falls on a different Gregorian date each year, but always in the same season.
Did you know? Pañchāngas are still printed and widely used across India today. Their precision is not guesswork — predicting an eclipse to the minute needs real astronomy, which is why Indian mathematics and astronomy (the Āryabhaṭīya, for example) grew up alongside calendar-making.