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NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 & 213Feathered Friend — Let us think and reflect

Book page 212 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Read the given extract and answer the questions that follow. “Sven was one of our best construction men, and excelled at the tricky and specialised work of collecting assorted girders as they floated around in free fall, making them do the slow-motion, three-dimensional ballet that would get them into their right positions, and fusing the pieces together when they were precisely dovetailed into the intended pattern: it was a skilled and difficult job, for a space suit is not the most convenient of garbs in which to work.” (i) What can be inferred about Sven’s abilities from his job description? A. He is good at following instructions but lacks creativity. B. He possesses a strong understanding of working in space. C. He struggles with the complexities of construction in space. D. He prefers working on simpler tasks rather than complex jobs.
Answer

B. He possesses a strong understanding of working in space.

Why: he “excelled at the tricky and specialised work”, handled girders that were themselves “floating around in free fall”, and could place them “precisely”. All three words point to mastery of the conditions — weightless mass that has no weight but still has full inertia — not just skill with tools.
Why the others fail: A is ruled out by the word ‘ballet', which is a creative image, not a mechanical one; C is contradicted by ‘excelled'; D by ‘one of our best construction men'.
Q2.
(ii) How can we conclude that Sven was working in zero gravity?
Answer

The extract says the girders were “floating around in free fall” and had to be moved in a “slow-motion, three-dimensional ballet”. On Earth a steel girder must be lifted against gravity, and it moves in the two dimensions a crane allows. Here it drifts in any direction, up and down have no meaning, and every push takes effect slowly — which is exactly how a mass behaves when nothing is pulling it down.

The paragraph that follows makes it explicit: Sven's team “could step back and admire their handiwork without being abruptly parted from it by gravity.”

The physics the image hides: in free fall the girder has no weight, but it keeps all its mass. So it is effortless to start moving and just as hard to stop — hence ‘slow-motion' and hence ‘tricky'. Clarke gets the science exactly right inside a single dancing metaphor.
Q3.
(iii) Select the option that is correct for both Assertion (A) and Reason (R). (A): Sven’s job required him to make girders perform a ‘three-dimensional ballet’ in space. (R): Working in zero gravity allows objects to float, making precise positioning more challenging. A. Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). B. Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). C. (A) is true, but (R) is false. D. (A) is false, but (R) is true.
Answer

A. Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Why: (A) is a direct restatement of the extract. (R) is true of free fall. And (R) explains (A): because the girders float freely in three dimensions, guiding them into position becomes a slow, careful, all-round manoeuvre — a ‘ballet' — instead of a straight lift. Remove the zero gravity and the metaphor collapses.
Q4.
(iv) Replace the underlined word with a word similar in meaning from the extract. During the festival, people wore colourful outfits that represented their culture.
Answer

During the festival, people wore colourful garbs that represented their culture.

The extract uses it in “a space suit is not the most convenient of garbs in which to work.” The glossary defines garbs as “clothing of a special kind”.

Shade of meaning: garb is not any clothing — it is clothing that marks a role or an occasion: a priest's garb, a soldier's garb, festival garb. That is why it fits a sentence about culture, and why it makes a space suit sound faintly ceremonial and comic.
Q5.
Read the given extract and answer the questions that follow. “Jim!” There’s something wrong with the air! That’s why Claribel’s passed out. I’ve just remembered that miners used to carry canaries down to warn them of gas.” / “Nonsense!” said Jim. “The alarms would have gone off. We’ve got duplicate circuits, operating independently.” / “Er—the second alarm circuit isn’t connected up yet,” his assistant reminded him. That shook Jim; he left without a word, while we stood arguing and passing the oxygen bottle around like a pipe of peace. (i) Fill in the blank by selecting the correct option from those given in the brackets. The narrator references canaries and miners in order to __________. (highlight the historical use of canaries as warning systems/explain the reason that caused Claribel to faint suddenly)
Answer

The narrator references canaries and miners in order to highlight the historical use of canaries as warning systems.

Why this and not the other option: he has already given the reason for the fainting in the sentence before — “There's something wrong with the air! That's why Claribel's passed out.” The miners come next as his evidence, the precedent that turns a guess into an argument Jim must take seriously. In other words, the first clause states the conclusion; the canary-and-miner reference supplies the proof.
Q6.
(ii) Complete the following sentence with a suitable reason. Jim initially dismisses the warning because __________.
Answer

Jim initially dismisses the warning because he trusts the station's engineering completely: he believes the alarms would already have gone off, since the station has “duplicate circuits, operating independently” — so in his mind a failure this serious could not pass unnoticed.

What Clarke is showing: Jim's confidence is not stupidity — it is the reasonable confidence of a duty engineer in a designed system. That is what makes his single word “Nonsense!” so effective: the story then knocks it down not with a better machine but with a canary. His silence afterwards — “he left without a word” — is the whole of his apology.
Q7.
(iii) What does the phrase ‘shook Jim’ mean in the context of the information in the extract? Jim was _________. A. physically pushed by someone B. startled by unexpected information C. cold and needed to warm up D. trying to shake off sleepiness
Answer

B. startled by unexpected information

Why: nobody touches Jim. What reaches him is his own assistant's sentence — “the second alarm circuit isn't connected up yet” — which destroys the very reason he had just given for dismissing the warning. ‘Shook' is used figuratively for a jolt to one's confidence, and the proof is what he does next: “he left without a word.”
The same verb, both ways: The blast shook the windows (literal) / The news shook her (figurative). Context alone decides.
Q8.
(iv) What does the crew’s action of passing the oxygen bottle around ‘like a pipe of peace’ suggest about their response to the situation?
Answer

It suggests that the quarrel is over and the crew has closed ranks. A ‘pipe of peace' — the calumet passed from hand to hand around a circle — is a ritual that ends a dispute and binds a group together. Applied to an oxygen bottle, the image says three things at once:

  • The argument has been settled by the facts, so they are no longer taking sides.
  • They are sharing the one thing that matters — good air — instead of competing for it. Fear has made them a group, not a crowd.
  • They are calm. Nobody panics or runs for a suit; they stand and talk, taking turns at the bottle.
And it is funny. Clarke keeps setting an ancient, dignified image beside a piece of hardware — a ballet of girders, an oxygen tent for a canary, a peace pipe made of an emergency cylinder. The humour is never a joke told at the reader; it comes from the gap between the grand comparison and the ordinary object.
Q9.
Answer the following questions. 1. What was the purpose of the alarm? What had caused its failure?
Answer

Purpose: the alarm existed to warn the crew the moment anything went wrong with the station's life support — here, to sound the instant the air purifier stopped doing its job. On a sealed station this is not a convenience; it is the difference between noticing a fault and never waking from it.

Cause of failure: a chain of three things, each harmless alone —

  1. a rare eclipse of the station by Earth's shadow cut off sunlight and heat that night;
  2. “part of the air purifier had frozen up”;
  3. “the single alarm in the circuit had failed to go off” — and the second, duplicate circuit that should have caught this “isn't connected up yet.”
The point Clarke is making: “Half a million dollars' worth of chemical and electronic engineering had let us down completely.” Complex systems do not usually fail through one dramatic breakdown; they fail when several small, forgivable gaps line up. The safeguard that actually worked cost nothing and was never designed at all.
Q10.
2. How does the crew’s reaction to Claribel change over the course of the story?
Answer

It moves through four clear stages, and the movement is the story's real plot.

StageHow the crew treat herText
SurpriseA shock in an impossible place“I forgot all about the angle beam just behind my head… We stared at each other for a minute”
AffectionA shared secret, everybody's pet“Claribel was a general pet”; they concealed her from VIPs
DistressGrief and helpless care“all equally distressed”; “we all waited in hushed silence”; the oxygen tent
Gratitude and respectRecognised as a safety device — a life-saver“Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead”; birdsong now means “you're being doubly safeguarded”
What the change means: she begins as contraband, becomes a companion, and ends as a piece of essential equipment — without ever ceasing to be a companion. The story does not ask us to choose between sentiment and usefulness; it argues that the sentimental decision was the useful one.
Q11.
3. What does the last part of the story tell us about the significance of unusual ways of problem solving?
Answer

It tells us that a solution's worth has nothing to do with how sophisticated it is, and that the ability to reach outside your own field is itself a skill.

The station's answer to bad air was expensive and modern: sensors, duplicate circuits, alarms. It failed. The answer that worked was a hundred years old and came from a coal mine — “miners used to carry canaries down to warn them of gas.” Note who supplies it: not the duty engineer, whose expertise made him certain the machines were fine, but the storekeeper, whose sluggish mind kept “tugging” at an old scrap of knowledge until “understanding exploded in my brain.”

Three lessons the ending draws:
  • Redundancy should be unlike itself. Two identical electronic circuits can fail for the same reason; a bird cannot fail the way a circuit does. That is why the closing line calls birdsong being “doubly safeguarded, at practically no extra expense.”
  • Old knowledge is not obsolete knowledge. A method from a Victorian coal mine works perfectly in orbit because the underlying biology has not changed.
  • Expertise can blind. Jim's “Nonsense!” came from knowing the system too well to doubt it.
Q12.
4. Justify the appropriateness of the title of the story.
Answer

The title ‘Feathered Friend' is exactly right, and it earns both of its words twice over.

  • ‘Feathered' names Claribel by the one feature that makes her different from every other thing on the station — everything else there is metal, plastic and glass. It also sets up the story's central contrast: feathers against “half a million dollars' worth of chemical and electronic engineering”.
  • ‘Friend' is true in the ordinary sense — she was “a general pet”, she woke the men each morning, and they grieved over her. But by the end it is true in a far stronger sense: a friend is someone who saves you. “Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead.”
Why a plainer title would be worse: ‘The Canary in the Space Station' would give away the surprise and reduce her to a device. ‘Feathered Friend' keeps her a person to the crew, so that when she turns out also to be a safety system, the reader feels both things at once — which is the effect Clarke wants.
Q13.
5. ‘Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead.’ What does this line suggest about uncertainty of life in space?
Answer

The line suggests that in space survival hangs on things too small and too dull to think about — a frozen valve, an unconnected wire, one unusually long night in Earth's shadow.

Its force lies in the phrase “slightly dead”, which is deliberately absurd: you cannot be slightly dead. The understatement does the work of a shout. It tells us that:

  • the margin between normal life and no life at all is very thin — thin enough that the crew crossed most of it in their sleep, waking only with a “nagging headache” and “sluggish” minds;
  • the danger gives no warning a human can feel. Oxygen shortage does not hurt; it makes you slow and content, which is why the narrator nearly failed to think at all;
  • the crew live with this and joke about it, because that is how people carry a permanent risk.
The device is called litotes / understatement: saying far less than the situation deserves so that the reader supplies the rest. “It was one of those accidents that couldn't possibly happen” works the same way — the calm sentence is more frightening than an alarmed one would be.
Q14.
6. Explain how has the writer presented science fiction with a touch of humour.
Answer

Clarke keeps the science exact and lets the tone carry the comedy. The humour never breaks the world; it comes out of it.

TechniqueExample from the storyEffect
Understatement“we should soon have been slightly dead”; “It was one of those accidents that couldn't possibly happen”Deadly danger delivered dryly, so the reader laughs and then feels the chill
Grand image, small objectGirders doing a “three-dimensional ballet”; an oxygen bottle passed “like a pipe of peace”Comic mismatch of scale and dignity
Self-mockery“the little cubbyhole laughingly called my office”; “when the stars had ceased to explode before my eyes”A narrator who refuses to sound heroic, so we trust him
Comic job titlesJock Duncan, “our cook-doctor-dietitian”, who admits “I've never listened to a canary's heart”Shows how improvised and small this frontier really is
Ordinary detail in an extraordinary placeThe 150-pound bonus and the “reducing diet”; the crew inventing excuses for peeps from the ventilating shaftsMakes space feel like a workplace, which is funnier and more convincing than making it feel like an adventure
Why the humour matters: it is what makes the ending land. Because the story has been light-footed throughout, the reader never braces for tragedy — and the discovery that they were minutes from dying arrives with real force. Comedy here is not decoration; it is the setting for the shock.
Q15.
7. How would Sven reflect on his experience of almost losing Claribel and for saving the lives of the entire crew?
Answer

The story does not give us Sven's thoughts, so this asks you to infer them from what he does say and do — the mournful “I don't know. I just found her like this”, the beaming relief when she revives, the lament “What's wrong with her? She's never done this before.” From those, a defensible reconstruction:

Sample answer (in Sven's voice): I have thought about it every shift since. I brought her up in my kit like a boy smuggling sweets into school, and I told the others it was for science — that I wanted to see how a bird would fly with no weight. That was half true. The other half was that I wanted something on this station that was alive and did not need to be repaired.

When I opened my hand that morning and saw those two claws sticking up, I was ashamed as much as grieved. I had taken her from a house with air and windows and put her in a tin can, and it had killed her — that is what I thought. I could not even tell them what had happened. Jock held her to his ear and said he had never listened to a canary's heart, and I remember thinking that nobody in this whole expensive place knew anything worth knowing.

Then she came out of the mask and gave her “Come to the cookhouse, boys” — and keeled over again. And it turned out she had not been dying of my carelessness at all. She had been telling us, twice over, that the air we were all breathing was going bad, and none of our alarms had the sense to agree with her.

So I stopped feeling guilty, and I have not quite stopped feeling frightened. Half a million dollars of engineering let us sleep towards our deaths, and a bird that weighs less than my glove woke us. I keep her cage door open now. She goes where she likes.
What makes this a good answer: it is grounded in the text (the smuggling, the ‘scientific curiosity' excuse, Jock's admission, the second collapse, the cost of the engineering), it holds two feelings at once — guilt turning into awe — and it stays in the dry, self-mocking register the story uses. Your own version may differ, but it must be built from evidence, not invented feeling.
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