NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 13 India's Agricultural Landscape — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 3 Updated on2026-09-19

Q1.

Create a list of the foods you typically eat. Identify the grains, pulses, oils, vegetables, and fruits in them.

Answer

Method. Write down what you actually ate for three days — breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner. Then break each dish into its raw ingredients and sort those into five columns. Do not sort the dishes; sort the crops inside them.

Sample answer: a three-day food list for a student in central India

Grains	Pulses	Oils	Vegetables	Fruits
Wheat (roti, poori)	Arhar / tur dal	Mustard oil	Potato	Banana
Rice (bhaat, idli)	Chana dal, besan	Groundnut oil	Onion, tomato	Mango (summer)
Maize (bhutta)	Moong (green gram)	Sunflower oil	Brinjal, bhindi	Guava
Bajra / jowar (roti)	Urad (black gram, in idli)	Coconut oil	Spinach, cabbage	Apple

Two things become visible as soon as the list is made:

Almost every dish is a mixture of several crops. One plate of idli-sambar already needs rice, urad dal, arhar dal, tamarind, vegetables and oil — grown in different fields, often in different states.
Several of these are named in this chapter's history section — sesame, black gram, green gram, mustard, cotton, mango, jackfruit — crops our ancestors were already growing thousands of years ago.

Why it matters: the plate is where farming reaches you. Once you can name the crop behind each item, the map of India's soils and seasons stops being a diagram in a book and becomes a description of your own meals.

Q2.

Now locate where you live on a physical map of India. (You may refer to the political map of India at the end of the book if you wish.) Which of the food items do you think grow in and around where you live? What do you think are the reasons that they are cultivated in your region?

Answer

Method — three steps.

Find your district on the physical map. Note what it sits on: plain, plateau, hill or coast.
Match that position to Fig. 1.9 (soil types) and to your state's rainfall and temperature.
Then check Fig. 1.10, which lists the crops actually grown on each soil type.

What a good answer needs: the crop, the soil it grows on, the season it belongs to, and the water it gets. Any answer that names crops but not reasons is only half done.

Sample answer: for a student living in the Gangetic plain of Uttar Pradesh

Grown in and around my region: wheat, rice, sugarcane, maize, mustard, potato, arhar dal, chana dal, mango and guava.

Reason	How it works here
Soil	Alluvial soil — silt brought down by the Ganga and its tributaries, “rich in nutrients”. It is deep, soft and easy to plough, and it feeds heavy crops like sugarcane and wheat.
Climate	Subtropical — hot, wet summers and cool, dry winters. The wet months give a kharif crop of rice; the cool months give a rabi crop of wheat and mustard.
Water	Southwest monsoon rain from June to September, plus canals, tube wells and rivers for the dry rabi months.
Terrain	Flat plain — easy to level into fields, easy to irrigate, easy to use machines on.

Why it happens: farmers do not choose crops at random. Over generations they learn which crop survives their rainfall, likes their soil and fetches a price in their market. What you eat locally is the record of that long experiment.

Q3.

Which of them comes from other places? Why do you think they are not grown in your area?

Answer

Method. Look for the items on your list that your neighbours do not grow — and then ask which of the four factors (soil, climate, water, terrain) is missing where you live.

Sample answer: continuing with the Gangetic-plain student above

Item	Comes from	Why it is not grown here
Coconut, coconut oil	Kerala, Tamil Nadu, coastal Karnataka	Needs a warm, humid coastal climate with laterite or sandy coastal soil and no winter cold. Our winters are too cool and dry.
Tea	Assam, Darjeeling, the Nilgiris	Needs high rainfall and sloping ground so water drains away from the roots. Our flat plain would waterlog the bushes.
Cotton cloth's raw cotton	Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh	Cotton does best on black soil, which “holds a lot of moisture”. Our soil is alluvial — cotton grows only with efficient irrigation, which is why Fig. 1.10 marks it with an asterisk.
Apple, walnut	Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand hills	Need a cold temperate or alpine climate with frost in winter. Our plains are far too hot.
Cardamom, nutmeg, rubber	Kerala, the Western Ghats	Need heavy tropical-wet rainfall and hill slopes with laterite soil.

Three honest reasons cover almost every case:

The climate is wrong — too hot, too cold, too dry, or the rain comes at the wrong time.
The soil is wrong — a crop planted on soil that cannot hold the moisture or supply the nutrients it needs will simply not repay the effort.
The terrain is wrong — tea and coffee want slopes; paddy wants flat, bunded fields that can hold standing water.

Did you know? A crop can often be forced to grow outside its ideal home — Fig. 1.10 marks such crops with a * and explains they “can be grown with efficient irrigation”. But it costs more water, more money and more risk. That is exactly why trade exists: it is cheaper to move an apple than to move a mountain climate.

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