NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 9 The chapter in three points — Before we move on …

Book page 148 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Family is the foundation of human society. Ideally, members of a family support each other in their many duties and tasks.

Answer

Read the sentence in two halves — a fact and an ideal.

The half of the sentence	What the chapter showed
“Family is the foundation of human society”	It is “the fundamental and most ancient unit of any society”, and “almost all of us live in a family”. Society is built out of families, not out of separate individuals
“members … support each other in their many duties and tasks”	Relationships rest on love, care, cooperation and interdependence; each member “has a role and responsibility towards other members” — Tenzing’s father taking over the chores, his grandmother cooking and telling stories, his grandfather teaching and serving the colony
The one careful word: “Ideally”	The book does not claim every family is like this. It says this is what a family is at its best — which is also why the chapter’s exercises ask you to look at who really does the work in your own home

Why ‘foundation’ is the right word: a foundation is what everything else stands on and is usually not visible. Values learnt at home — sharing, taking turns, giving up something for someone else — are carried out into the street, the school and the workplace by everyone who leaves that home each morning. Shalini’s cotton dress is a small thing; the habit it belongs to is not.

Q2.

Community, a bigger unit, also implies that people do their best to support each other. ‘Community’ can be defined in several ways and there are many kinds of community.

Answer

Three claims in one sentence, and the chapter proves each.

Claim	Evidence in the chapter
A community is a bigger unit than a family	“Families are connected not only within themselves, but also with other families and the people around them” — the circle simply widens
People support each other in it	Festivals, feasts and weddings; help with land preparation, sowing and harvesting; the halma of the Bhil community; food cooked and distributed in the Chennai floods of 2015; Kamal Parmar’s evening classes in Ahmedabad
It can be defined in several ways	A jāti or a subdivision of it; a group of one religion, region, common work or interest — ‘Mumbai’s Parsi community’, ‘Kerala’s scientific community’, ‘the village’s farming community’; and in school, your class, the sports community, the NSS, the NCC, a science or drama club
New kinds keep appearing	Residents’ Welfare Associations of the last 30–40 years, which frame their own rules on waste, cleanliness and pets

And with support come duties: “all families and individuals within the community have specific duties to perform. Otherwise, the community will not function smoothly.”

Q3.

Ultimately, communities are interdependent.

Answer

No community can live on its own. The chapter’s own example: the same Residents’ Welfare Association that makes rules for its colony “will depend on the trading community for supplies and also on municipal workers to handle waste”.

Every community in the picture depends on the others — and each of them buys, sells, eats and throws away.

The same holds all the way down the chain: the traders need transporters and farmers; the municipal workers need equipment made by others; the farmers need seed, tools and a market. The chapter’s conclusion is plain — “in our complex societies, everyone depends on a number of other people and communities.”

Why ‘ultimately’ is the right word to end the chapter with: the chapter began with the smallest circle, the family, where interdependence is obvious — a child depends on parents, parents on each other, and the elderly on the young. It ends by showing that the same relationship holds between the biggest circles too. Nothing in society stands alone; everything is held up by something else.

Was this helpful? Report an error