NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 Feathered Friend — Let us write

Book page 219 to 221 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Complete the social media web given below with the uses of the internet. Now, write an article titled ‘The Importance of Internet’ with the help of the social media web. Points to remember: Heading/Title, Name of the writer; Paragraph 1: Give a general introduction to the topic. Paragraph 2: Explain the uses of the internet and why it is important. Give examples to support your view. Paragraph 3: End with a comment and leave the reader with a thoughtful idea or quote.

Answer

Completing the web. The icons printed around the globe in your book stand for the everyday uses of the internet. Label them like this:

Icon in the web	Use of the internet
Music note	Entertainment — streaming music, films and games
Camera (Instagram)	Sharing photographs and short videos
Facebook	Staying in touch with family and friends; community groups
X	News, opinion and public announcements in real time
Envelope	Email — formal and official communication
Profile / person	Online identity, and services that need one: banking, DigiLocker, admissions
Location pin	Maps, navigation and finding local services
Globe with laptop	The centre — learning, research and work from anywhere

Sample answer — the article

THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERNET
by Meera Nambiar, Class VIII-B

Thirty years ago, a student who needed to know the boiling point of mercury walked to a library and hoped the right book was on the shelf. Today the answer arrives in two seconds, on a phone, in a village with no library at all. That change is the internet, and it has quietly rearranged how we learn, earn, buy, travel and keep in touch.

Its uses reach into every ordinary hour of the day. It teaches: NCERT's own textbooks, DIKSHA lessons and thousands of recorded classes are free to anyone with a data pack, so a child in Ziro can attend a lecture given in Delhi. It connects: email carries an office's work, while messaging and social platforms carry a grandmother's voice across three time zones. It informs: a cyclone warning now reaches a fishing village faster than the storm does. It serves: UPI moves money between a vegetable cart and a bank without either party touching a note, and portals for scholarships, tickets and identity documents have replaced whole days of queuing. And it entertains — music, films and games that once needed a shop now need only a screen. Behind all of these sits the same simple fact: the internet removes distance as a cost.

But a tool this powerful magnifies the hand that holds it. The same network that carries a physics lesson carries a rumour that can start a riot; the same speed that delivers a warning delivers a scam. The internet does not make us wiser — it makes us faster, and the direction is still ours to choose. Perhaps that is the thing to remember every time we unlock a screen: information is not knowledge until someone has thought about it.

How the article was built: paragraph 1 opens with a concrete contrast instead of a definition; paragraph 2 turns each icon of the web into one clause with one Indian example; paragraph 3 raises an objection and closes on an idea rather than a summary. Follow that shape and change the examples to your own.

Q2.

Astronauts living in space stations have to do things differently. Read how they manage the routine tasks in the absence of gravity. You may find out more information about it from the internet. 1. Write: Astronauts use a special Space Pen which has a cartridge with ink combined with resin. The ink remains solid until friction with the ball at the point of the pen liquefies it. It works in all positions, in extreme heat and cold, and in atmospheres ranging from pure oxygen to vacuum. 2. Exercise: Astronauts use resistance exercise equipment. Weight training is done by applying a load using vacuum cylinders. Running on the treadmill is made possible with the bodies held down using rubber straps. 3. Eat: Astronauts eat preserved foods which is dried, canned, vacuum-packed, and frozen. These can be prepared by adding cold or hot water, and some can be heated in an oven. They also eat ready-to-eat items, such as nuts, breads, and fruits. 4. Sleep: Astronauts can sleep on a floor, wall, or ceiling as there’s no distinction between up and down but they may gradually float away while sleeping. Therefore, they need to restrain their bodies in small sleeping compartments or sleeping bags.

Answer

Read the four passages together and you will see that every one of them solves the same problem in a different way. Without gravity, nothing stays where you put it, nothing flows downwards, and nothing presses on anything else. Here is the pattern:

Task	What gravity normally does for us	How astronauts replace it
Write	Pulls ink down to the ball of the pen	A sealed cartridge pushes thixotropic ink forward under pressure; the ink stays solid until the rolling ball's friction liquefies it
Exercise	Gives your body a load to work against, keeping bone and muscle strong	Vacuum cylinders supply an artificial load; rubber straps hold the runner down on the treadmill
Eat	Keeps food on the plate and liquids in the glass	Food is dried, canned, vacuum-packed or frozen, then rehydrated; drinks are sucked from sealed pouches
Sleep	Holds you on the bed	Sleeping bags are strapped to a wall — floor, wall and ceiling are all the same thing

The one that matters most is exercise. In free fall the skeleton stops being loaded, so astronauts lose roughly 1–1.5% of bone mass per month and their leg muscles weaken quickly. That is why exercise on the ISS is not recreation but a scheduled two-hour daily duty on the ARED resistance machine, the treadmill and the cycle. It also explains a line in your story — Sven's team could “step back and admire their handiwork without being abruptly parted from it by gravity”: the same absence of weight that makes construction easy makes the human body deteriorate.

Find out more: why fizzy drinks are not carried (the gas will not separate from the liquid without gravity, so the bubbles stay in the stomach); why astronauts often lose their appetite in the first days (fluid shifts upward and blocks the sinuses, dulling taste, which is why hot sauce is popular on the ISS); and how Indian astronaut-designate crews training for Gaganyaan are being prepared for these same routines.

Q3.

Did you know that animals can save humans from natural calamities? Animals can sense natural calamities. Read the following examples and decide if this is true. • In 2004, before a tsunami could hit the coastline of Indonesia, some animals made efforts to flee—elephants ran for higher ground, flamingos abandoned low-lying nesting areas, and dogs refused to go outdoors. • Minutes before the Naples quake of 1805, oxen, sheep, dogs, and geese started making alarm calls in unison. • Migratory birds crossing the Pacific are able to dodge storms and other hazards. • In the Gulf of Mexico, sharks sense the drop in barometric pressure that precedes hurricanes and tend to swim to deeper waters as a result. Dolphins have also been observed swimming away from storm-prone areas. Scientists have studied this behaviour and found that when severe stresses arise in deep rock before the earthquake, ultra-low frequency electromagnetic waves are generated that animals can sense.

Answer

Yes — but with an important limit, and stating that limit is what makes this a good answer rather than a repeated story.

What is well established. Animals do detect physical signals we cannot.

Pressure. Sharks and many fish have organs sensitive to pressure change, so a falling barometer before a hurricane is a real, measurable cue. Birds detect it too, which is why they leave ahead of storms.
Infrasound. Sound below about 20 Hz is inaudible to us but travels enormous distances. Elephants hear and produce it; so do pigeons. A tsunami and a distant storm both generate infrasound long before the water or wind arrives — a plausible explanation for the 2004 accounts.
Ground vibration. The fast, weak P-wave of an earthquake arrives seconds to a minute before the destructive S-wave. Animals close to the ground feel it and react; this is genuine early detection, though of an earthquake that has already begun.

What is still uncertain. The claim in the last line — that stressed rock releases ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic waves which animals sense days in advance — is a hypothesis, not settled science. Seismologists point out that the evidence is almost entirely anecdotal and collected after the disaster, when people remember the dog that barked and forget the hundred that did not. There is at present no method that predicts an earthquake reliably from animal behaviour.

How to judge a claim like this: ask three questions. Is there a mechanism (a sense organ that could detect the signal)? Was the observation made before the event or recalled afterwards? Have the failures been counted as well as the successes? Pressure and infrasound pass all three tests; earthquake prediction passes only the first.

Link back to the unit: Claribel is exactly this principle used deliberately. She does not predict anything mysterious — she simply has a body that registers a real physical change sooner than a human body does. That is the honest, scientific version of ‘animals can save humans'.

Q4.

Salim Ali, the ‘Birdman of India’, was an Indian ornithologist (a person who studies birds). He was the first Indian to conduct systematic bird surveys across India and wrote several books on birds. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1976.

Answer

Sálim Ali (1896–1987) is the natural person to meet at the end of a story about a bird that saves lives, because he spent sixty years arguing that birds are worth paying attention to.

Fact	Detail
Why ‘Birdman of India'	He carried out the first systematic, region-by-region bird surveys of India, turning bird-watching from a hobby into fieldwork with method and records.
Best-known book	The Book of Indian Birds (1941) — still the book most Indian birdwatchers begin with; and the ten-volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan with S. Dillon Ripley.
Autobiography	The Fall of a Sparrow — named after the yellow-throated sparrow he shot as a boy, whose identification sent him to the Bombay Natural History Society and changed his life.
Conservation work	His campaigning helped save Bharatpur (Keoladeo) and helped stop the Silent Valley hydro-electric project in Kerala.
Honours	Padma Bhushan 1958, Padma Vibhushan 1976; the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), Coimbatore, is named for him.

The idea worth taking away: Sálim Ali's argument was that birds are indicators — the health of a wetland, a forest or a city can be read from which birds still live there. That is the canary-in-the-coal-mine principle applied to a whole country, and it is why the disappearance of house sparrows and vultures from Indian cities was treated as a warning about us, not only about them.

Do this: keep a bird diary for one week — date, time, place, bird, what it was doing. That is exactly how Sálim Ali began, and it is how the Great Backyard Bird Count still works today.

Q5.

We need to conserve our ‘feathered’ friends. Work in groups of four. Look at the pictures and make a bird feeder with cardboard, chart paper, etc.

Answer

The four pictures in your book show four workable designs. Read them as four different solutions to the same three problems: hold the grain, keep out the rain, give the bird somewhere to stand.

Picture	Design	What to notice
1.	A milk carton cut into an owl's face and tied to a tree trunk	The folded flap below the opening is a ledge — birds will not feed where they cannot perch.
2.	A tall painted carton ‘house' hung among leaves	The overhanging roof keeps rain off the grain. Leaves give the bird cover from cats and crows.
3.	A carton feeder fixed to a wall, with pencils pushed through as perches and a tray of seed	Two pencils through opposite walls make a strong perch and also brace the box.
4.	A diamond of stiff card with a round hole, a mesh cup of seed and pencil perches, hung on string	Hanging free means squirrels and cats cannot reach it; the mesh lets water drain out.

How to make design 4 (the easiest and the most successful):

Cut a 20 cm square of thick cardboard and stand it on a corner so it becomes a diamond. Cover both faces with chart paper and let it dry flat.
Cut a round hole about 8 cm across in the centre. Push two pencils or thin sticks through the card below the hole so they stick out on both sides — these are the perches.
Tie a small steel or plastic mesh cup (a used tea strainer works) inside the hole so it hangs level. Mesh matters: it lets rainwater drain and stops the grain from rotting.
Punch a hole at the top corner, thread strong string through it, and hang the feeder from a branch or a grille, at least 2 m above the ground and away from any wall a cat can jump from.
Fill with whole grain — bajra, jowar, broken rice or unsalted sunflower seeds. Set a shallow earthen dish of water nearby; in an Indian summer, water saves more birds than food does.

Rules that decide whether birds actually come: never put out salted, fried or spiced food, or bread — none of it is bird food. Clean the feeder every week with plain water so droppings do not spread disease. Refill on the same days: birds learn a schedule and abandon a feeder that keeps failing them. And be patient — a new feeder is usually ignored for a week or more before the first sparrow risks it.

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