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NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 3 The Case of the Fifth Word, Part I — Let us discuss

Book page 104 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Complete the following statements with suitable reasons. Share your answers with your classmates and teacher. 1. Leroy’s nickname was Encyclopedia and everyone called him by that name because ______________.
Answer
Leroy's nickname was Encyclopedia and everyone called him by that name because his head, like an encyclopedia, was packed with facts from A to Z — “He read more books than anyone in Idaville, and he never forgot a fact.”

The writer even explains the joke for us: “An encyclopedia is a book or set of books filled with facts from A to Z. So was Encyclopedia's head.” His friends stretched the comparison further — he was “like a library and computer rolled into one, and more user-friendly”.

Why it matters to the story: the nickname is not decoration. It tells the reader in advance how this detective will win — not by chasing suspects but by remembering something. When he later recognises that four odd words are days of the week, the reader has already been told he never forgets a fact.
Q2.
2. At the dinner table on Tuesday night, Chief Brown stared at his cream-of-mushroom soup as ______________.
Answer
…as he had a mystery he could not solve, and staring silently at his soup was the family's signal for it.

The text makes it a household code: “Encyclopedia and his mother knew what that meant. He had a mystery he could not solve.”

Look at the craft here: Sobol never writes “Chief Brown was worried.” He gives a small physical detail — a man staring at his soup — and then tells us the family can read it. That is showing instead of telling, and it also opens the case briskly: within two lines of the soup, we are hearing about Tim Nolan.
Q3.
3. Encyclopedia sat quietly at the dinner table because ______________.
Answer
…because he knew his mother and father were laying out the facts of the case for his benefit, and listening carefully was his part of the work.

The line is direct: “Encyclopedia sat quietly. He knew his mother and father were discussing the case for his benefit.” If he had interrupted with questions, the flow of facts would have stopped — and he needed all of them before he could ask his one question.

What it reveals about him: patience and a listener's discipline. Notice that the family never says “Leroy, solve this.” The parents pretend to talk to each other; the boy pretends to eat. This quiet arrangement protects the secret that a police chief is being helped by an eighth grader.
Q4.
4. Nolan put the will on the kitchen table because ______________.
Answer
…because he had suffered a stroke, knew he was dying, and wanted the will — with the calendar sheet clipped to it — to be found at once and passed to Davenport.

“He must have realised he was dying. With his last strength, he managed to put his will on the kitchen table. It leaves everything he owns, including his palm-tree nursery, to Davenport.”

The real reason behind the reason: the will is not generosity — it is delivery. Nolan had changed the hiding place and could not reach Davenport by phone. The only way to send a message to a man who has vanished is to make him inherit: a lawyer will hunt him down to tell him he owns a nursery, and the clipped calendar sheet will travel with the news. The kitchen table is simply where the police were certain to look.
Tip for extract questions: when a dying character does something odd, ask who is meant to see it. Here the audience is Davenport, not the police — which is exactly why the note looks like nonsense to Chief Brown.
Q5.
Do you think Chief Brown would need Leroy’s help to solve this case? If yes, why? If no, why not?
Answer

Yes — Chief Brown would need Leroy's help, and the story is careful to prove it before Leroy speaks.

  • Ordinary police work had already failed. He obtained a court order and “Officers Lewis and Maloney just about took Nolan's house apart. They didn't find one piece of the stolen jewellery.” Searching harder was not going to work.
  • The one real clue defeated both adults. Chief Brown “shook his head and passed the notebook to Mrs. Brown”; Mrs. Brown, a former English teacher, gave the dictionary meaning of every word and then confessed, “I can't figure it out.”
  • The clue needed a reader, not an investigator. The answer lay in the shape of the words and in where they were written — a calendar sheet. That is a puzzle-solver's skill, and it is Leroy's.
  • The story has already established the pattern. “When he came up against a case he couldn't solve… He cleared his desk, put on his hat, and went home to dinner. Encyclopedia solved the case for him before dinner was over.”
If you argue ‘No': a fair case can be made that the police would have got there eventually — they now had Davenport's address, and watching him would have led them to the jewellery. But that would take weeks and a warrant; Leroy took one question and the length of a bowl of soup. The honest answer is that the police could have solved it slowly; Leroy solved it at once.
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