NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 Bibha Chowdhuri — Let us do these activities before we read (2026-27)

Q1.

Work in pairs. What qualities do you associate with a scientist? Share your answers with your classmates and teacher. Complete the word web given below. (Centre of the web: Qualities of a scientist)

Answer

Fill the six arrows of the web with qualities, and be ready to justify each with an example. Six that the article itself will illustrate:

Quality	What it means in practice	Seen later in this text
Curiosity	Asking why, even when nobody is asking it with you	Bibha's move into the new field of cosmic rays
Persistence	Continuing after failure, and without reward	“Chowdhuri never received any awards during her lifetime, but continued her work tirelessly”
Careful observation	Recording exactly what is there, not what you hoped	‘She has an eye for Cosmic Rays'
Honesty	Reporting results that go against your own expectation	The basis of all published research, including her thesis
Courage	Working where you are not expected or welcome	“a woman who defied the odds” in “the male-dominated field of physics”
Patience / tenacity	Accepting that useful work is slow	“decades of crucial research, from Kolar Gold Mines to the Physical Research Laboratory”

Worth arguing about in class: two qualities people usually leave out. First, collaboration — the image of the lone genius is largely a myth; Bibha worked with Bhabha, Blackett and Sarabhai, and Chandrayaan-3 needed over fifty women and thousands of people. Second, willingness to be wrong, which is the quality that separates science from opinion: a scientist must be able to abandon a favourite idea when the evidence refuses it.

Q2.

Some pictures of women scientists are given below. What do you know about their work? Share your answers with your classmates and teacher.

Answer

The six portraits beside the launch illustration are printed without names, so do not guess at identities. Say what you can see, then bring in the women you actually know about. That is the honest way to answer.

What the page shows: an ISRO launch vehicle lifting off, with a spacecraft's looping orbits around the Earth and the Moon — the profile of a Chandrayaan mission — and six women's faces beside it, one of them in an orange flight suit.

Sample answer: I recognise the mission in the picture before I recognise the faces — that is Chandrayaan, with the spacecraft spiralling outward from Earth orbit to the Moon. Among Indian women scientists, the ones whose work I know are:

Dr. Ritu Karidhal Srivastava, called the ‘Rocket Woman of India' — Deputy Operations Director of the Mars Orbiter Mission and Mission Director for Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3, which this very chapter goes on to describe.
M. Vanitha, Project Director of Chandrayaan-2 — the first woman to lead an Indian interplanetary mission.
Dr. Tessy Thomas, known as the ‘Missile Woman of India' for her work on the Agni programme at DRDO.
Kalpana Chawla, the first woman of Indian origin in space, who died in the Columbia accident in 2003 — a picture of a woman in an orange launch-and-entry suit usually shows her.
Janaki Ammal, the botanist whose work on sugarcane and on plant chromosomes made her one of the first Indian women to take a doctorate in botany.
Anandibai Joshi, one of the earliest Indian women to qualify as a doctor of medicine, in 1886.

And the one I did not know until this chapter is Bibha Chowdhuri herself — which is exactly the writer's point.

A fair caution: since the book does not label the portraits, do not claim in an examination that a particular face is a particular scientist. Describe what you see, then discuss the women whose work you can actually give facts about. Being able to say ‘I cannot identify this, but here is what I do know' is a scientific habit in itself.