NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 & 212Feathered Friend — Let us discuss
Book page 211 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
Identify whether the following statements from parts I and II are true or false. Share your answers with your classmates and teacher. 1. The alarm at the space station failed to work properly because they were not connected.
Answer
True — with one precise detail worth adding.
The station had two alarm circuits “operating independently”, but the assistant admits, “Er — the second alarm circuit isn't connected up yet.” That left only one alarm, and when the eclipse froze part of the air purifier, “the single alarm in the circuit had failed to go off.”
Be exact: the first alarm was connected and still failed; the second was never wired up. So the safety system failed because the duplicate did not exist — a single fault was enough to defeat it. That is precisely why engineers build duplicate circuits, and precisely why an unfinished one is worse than useless: it creates the belief that you are protected.
Q2.
2. Claribel was brought to the space station for an official experiment on animal behaviour in space.
Answer
False.
There was nothing official about it. Sven “had smuggled her up on the last ferry from Earth, when he came back from leave”, and he “didn't confess to her ownership for several days”. The curiosity he mentions was his own private curiosity, not a sanctioned experiment.
Q3.
3. The canary’s suffering helped the crew discover a problem with the air purifier.
Answer
True.
Claribel collapsed, revived on oxygen and “promptly keeled over again”. That second collapse jogged the narrator's memory — “miners used to carry canaries down to warn them of gas” — and sent Jim to check. He returned to report that “part of the air purifier had frozen up”.
The science behind it: a bird's respiratory system passes air through the lungs in one direction and takes in oxygen on both the in-breath and the out-breath. It is far more efficient than ours — which also means a bird absorbs a poison, or feels a shortage of oxygen, much sooner than a human does. That is why canaries were taken down coal mines.
Q4.
4. The air purifier froze because there was a rare eclipse.
Answer
True.
“It was one of those accidents that couldn't possibly happen; we'd had one of our rare eclipses by Earth's shadow that night; part of the air purifier had frozen up.”
Why an eclipse matters in orbit: the station lives “in permanent sunlight”, so sunlight is also its source of heat. When Earth's shadow cut that off, the temperature fell far enough for part of the purifier to freeze. Notice how Clarke chooses a cause no one could have planned for — that is what makes the chain of failure believable rather than careless.
Q5.
5. Claribel could fly gracefully in the space station, performing loops in the air.
Answer
True.
She hung “as motionless as a hummingbird”, and then “she did a curious kind of backward loop I'm sure no earthbound canary had ever managed, and departed with a few leisurely flicks.”
Q6.
6. The space station crew was uninterested in Claribel and hardly noticed her presence after she was discovered.
Answer
False.
The opposite is true. “By that time it no longer mattered, because Claribel was a general pet.” The whole crew helped conceal her from visiting VIPs, she woke both Sven and the narrator each ‘morning', and when she was found lifeless the crew were “all equally distressed”.
Q7.
7. Claribel had fainted and had to be revived with oxygen supply.
Answer
True.
Someone suggested “a shot of oxygen”, and “Claribel was tucked snugly into a face mask that was large enough to serve as a complete oxygen tent for her. To our delighted surprise, she revived at once.”
Detail worth keeping: a human face mask makes a whole oxygen tent for a canary. Clarke uses that comic mismatch of scale to remind us how tiny the creature is — which makes it all the more striking that she is the one who saves them.