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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 9 Roles and Responsibilities — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 140 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Answer these questions and compare your answers with a few classmates: Who in your family decides what is to be bought from the market?
Answer

Answer for your own home — there is no single correct answer, and the point of the exercise is to see how many different answers a class produces.

Sample answer: In my home, my mother makes the list of what is needed for the kitchen, but the final decision on bigger purchases is taken together by my mother and father. For vegetables, my grandmother often decides, because she knows what is fresh in this season.

What a good answer contains: (1) who decides everyday purchases; (2) who decides big or costly purchases; (3) whether it is one person or a discussion. The chapter’s own example is Tenzing’s family: “When any special expenses come up, I have often seen that they discuss them together.”
Q2.
Who cooks food in your home?
Answer

Sample answer: My mother cooks most days. On Sundays my father makes breakfast, and I have started helping with cutting vegetables and making tea. When my grandmother is with us, she cooks the festival food, because only she knows the family recipes.

Why the book asks this: cooking is the clearest example of a role in a household. Notice, when the class compares answers, how often the answer is a woman — and notice the chapter’s counter-example on page 141: when Tenzing’s mother became busy in the handicraft cooperative, his father took over cleaning the house, the vegetable garden and other chores, and helps his grandmother prepare food. Roles at home can be shared, and they can change.
Q3.
Who is the oldest person in your family?
Answer

Sample answer: My grandfather, who is 74. He is the oldest member of our family. My great-grandmother, who is 91, lives with my father’s uncle in our village, and we visit her every year.

Take it further: ask the oldest person in your family one question — what their school, their village or their town was like when they were your age. Write down the answer in four or five lines. That is a small piece of history that exists nowhere else.
Q4.
Who cleans the floor in your home?
Answer

Sample answer: We share it. My mother sweeps in the morning; I sweep my own room and the sitting room in the evening; my elder sister mops on holidays. Once a week we all clean together, which takes half the time.

Tip for the comparison in class: add a second column to your answer — “and who helps?” Very often one person does a job and one or two others help. Both belong in the answer.
Q5.
Who washes utensils in your house?
Answer

Sample answer: My mother washes the utensils after lunch, and my brother and I wash them after dinner, turn by turn — one week each. On days when there are guests, everybody joins in.

Q6.
Who helps you to do your homework?
Answer

Sample answer: My elder sister helps me with mathematics, my mother listens to me read aloud, and for social science I ask my grandfather, who likes explaining maps. When nobody is free, I finish it myself and get it checked the next morning.

What all six questions add up to: lay your six answers side by side and you have a picture of the roles and responsibilities in your home — exactly the idea the section is about. Then compare with classmates and two things become visible. First, no two families divide the work in the same way. Second, in many homes the heaviest household work still falls on women and girls, and this is worth discussing as a class: which jobs at home could be shared more evenly, and what could you take over this month? The chapter’s own answer is that “through daily practice, children learn to participate in the life of the household”.
Discuss with respect: some classmates may live with one parent, with grandparents or with a guardian, and in some homes an adult is away for work. Every arrangement is a family. Compare the sharing of work, never the families themselves.
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