NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 19 Introduction — In-text Questions

Book page 170 Updated on2026-09-19

Q1.

Imagine you wake up one morning, ready for school. But when you step outside, there are no roads. The buses are gone. No one’s mobile phone has any signal. The lights won’t turn on, the internet is gone, and the tap is running dry! How would you reach school?

Answer

Mostly, I could not — and if I did, it would take most of the day. With no roads and no buses, the only ways left are walking or cycling over open ground, and only if the school is close enough.

Work through what has failed, one piece at a time:

Missing piece	What it stops
No roads	No car, autorickshaw, cycle-rickshaw or truck can move; even an ambulance is stuck
No buses	Children from far-off villages and colonies cannot come at all
No mobile signal	I cannot tell the school I am late, and my family cannot check that I am safe
No electricity	No lights, no fans, no computer lab; a school that starts before sunrise cannot begin

Why it happens: reaching school is not one service but a chain of them — a surface to travel on, a vehicle, fuel or electricity for that vehicle, and a signal to coordinate. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, which is the point the whole Introduction is making.

Q2.

How would groceries, and stationery reach your nearest market and your home?

Answer

They would not reach in any useful quantity. Almost everything in a shop has already travelled — by truck on a highway, by goods train, by ship into a port, or by all three.

Follow one item, a packet of rice:

field → road → mandi
mandi → goods train or truck → wholesaler’s warehouse
warehouse → road → your neighbourhood shop
shop → your street → home

Break any arrow and the packet stops. Without roads, a shopkeeper could sell only what is grown or made within walking distance. Perishable goods — milk, vegetables, fruit — would be worst hit, because they cannot wait. The chapter shows the same idea from the other end: Satish’s tomatoes reach the city because “good roads helped trucks carry his tomatoes to the city, cold storage kept them fresh”.

Check it yourself: Look at five things in your school bag and ask where each was made. Almost none will have been made in your own street — every one of them arrived on infrastructure.

Q3.

How would you access utilities like electricity and water?

Answer

Only by carrying water by hand and doing without electric power. Utilities do not arrive on their own; they arrive through built networks.

Electricity is generated far away — at a dam like Bhakra Nangal, a wind farm like Muppandal, or a solar project like the one at Cochin International Airport (Fig. 7.2) — and then carried over transmission lines to your switchboard. No lines, no light, no pump, no mobile tower.
Water reaches the tap through pipelines from a reservoir or treatment plant. Without them, a household must fetch water from a well, a handpump, a pond or a river, carry it home, and boil or filter it before drinking.

Why it happens: the chapter calls electricity and water pipelines utilities, one of the four families of physical infrastructure. Their special feature is that they are continuous — a road can be used now and then, but a water pipe or a power line has to work every hour of every day, which is why maintaining them matters as much as building them.

Tip: Notice how the losses spread. No electricity also means no mobile tower, so “no signal” in this imaginary morning is really a second effect of the first failure. Infrastructure failures rarely stay alone.

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