NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 Magnifying Glass (poem by Walter de la Mare) — Let us do these activities before we read

Book page 222 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Work in pairs. Answer the questions that follow the pictures given below. Share your answers with your classmates and teacher. 1. What is common in all these pictures?

Answer

In every picture somebody is looking at something small through a magnifying glass.

The four scenes are otherwise completely unlike one another:

two elderly men seated on a mat, one holding a lens over a paper the other is showing him;
a man in a shirt and waistcoat bending low over a line of footprints on a path, lens in hand — the classic detective;
a man examining an ant on the leaf of a plant;
a girl in a pink kurta crouching in the grass to look closely at mushrooms and flowers.

The point of the set: old and young, indoors and outdoors, work and play, evidence and wonder — the one thing they share is the act of looking closely. That is precisely the poem's subject, so the pictures are teaching you the theme before you read a line of it.

Q2.

2. Select the pictures you are familiar with.

Answer

Choose the ones that match something you have actually seen and say where.

Sample answer: I am most familiar with the third and fourth pictures. My grandfather keeps a magnifying glass on his table to read the small print of the newspaper and the numbers on medicine strips, so the picture of an elderly man using a lens over a paper is an everyday sight at home. The girl looking at mushrooms is familiar in a different way — after the first rain, mushrooms come up in the corner of our school ground and we crouch over them exactly like that, though without a lens. The detective picture I know only from books and films.

Q3.

3. Why do you think the people in the pictures need to use a magnifying glass?

Answer

Because the human eye has a limit, and each of them has run into it for a different reason.

Picture	Reason for the lens
Elderly men with a paper	Age. As we grow older the eye's lens stiffens and cannot focus on near objects (presbyopia), so small print must be enlarged.
Man examining footprints	Evidence. Details that decide a case — the depth of a print, a torn thread — are too fine to be trusted to the naked eye.
Man and the ant on a leaf	Study. To identify an insect you must see its legs, antennae and wings, which are millimetres long.
Girl and the mushrooms	Curiosity. She simply wants to see how the gills and stalk are made.

How the lens does it: a magnifying glass is a convex lens. Held closer to the object than its focal length, it produces a virtual, upright, enlarged image. It does not add any detail to the object — it makes the image on your retina bigger, so detail your eye was already receiving becomes usable.

Q4.

4. What other instruments magnify objects?

Answer

Instrument	What it magnifies	Roughly how much
Reading / hand lens	Print, stamps, insects	2× to 10×
Spectacles for long sight	Near objects, for the wearer	Small but constant
Binoculars	Distant objects — birds, a match, hills	7× to 12×
Compound microscope	Cells, onion peel, pond water	40× to 1000×
Electron microscope	Viruses, crystal structure	up to a million ×
Optical telescope	The Moon, planets, stars	Depends on the eyepiece
Projector / camera zoom	An image thrown on a screen or sensor	Varies

Two different jobs: a microscope brings out detail in something tiny and close; a telescope brings out detail in something large and far. Both do it with lenses (or mirrors) — which is exactly the leap the poem makes in its last stanza, from a scrap of chalk to the moon.

Q5.

If you have a magnifying glass, what would you like to use it for and why? Share your answers with your classmates and teacher.

Answer

Name a specific object, say what you expect to see, and say why it interests you. Vagueness is the only wrong answer here.

Sample answer: I would use it on a butterfly's wing that I found on the veranda. From arm's length the wing is just orange and black, but I have read that the colour is not paint at all — it is thousands of tiny overlapping scales, and some of them are not coloured but shaped so that they bend light. I would like to see whether I can make out the rows of scales, and whether the black parts and the orange parts look different up close. After that I would look at a pinch of sand, because every grain in it is supposed to be a different rock.

Why this is the right kind of answer: it names the object, states a prediction (‘scales, not paint'), and gives a reason for wanting to check. That is what the poem's speaker does too — he does not merely admire, he watches and reports.

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