NCERT Solutions Curiosity Chapter 12 –209End-of-chapter projects — Discover, design, and debate

Book page 208 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Plan a clean-up day at school or a nearby park. Wearing gloves and using bags, collect the litter you find. Discuss the kinds of waste you found. Which was the most common? How can we reduce such waste?

Answer

How to run it: divide the ground into blocks, one group per block, and carry three bags — plastic, paper, and other. Wear gloves throughout, do not pick up glass or anything sharp by hand, and wash your hands afterwards. Weigh or count what each group collects so the class has data, not just impressions.

Sample record from a one-hour clean-up of a school ground and the park beside it:

Kind of waste	Number of pieces	Where most of it came from
Plastic wrappers and pouches	146	Snack packets near the gate and the canteen
Plastic bottles and cups	38	Around the benches
Paper and cardboard	27	Near the classrooms
Glass and metal	9	Along the boundary wall

Most common: plastic wrappers, by a wide margin. They are light, they blow about, they do not decompose, and no decomposer can break them down — so they stay in the ecosystem indefinitely.

How to reduce it: carry food in a steel or cloth container instead of buying wrapped snacks; keep a refillable water bottle; put segregated bins where the litter actually appears (near the gate and canteen, not only near the office); ask the canteen to stop single-use plastic; compost the kitchen and garden waste in a school pit so that the part of the waste that can decompose actually does.

Why it happens: in nature, nothing is wasted, because every kind of dead matter has a decomposer that can use it. Plastic is the exception: it has no decomposer. That is precisely why it accumulates, and why reducing it matters more than clearing it up.

Q2.

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Nyishi and Mishmi tribes treat the Tiger as sacred. In Chhattisgarh, the Baiga tribe worships the Bagesur Dev and believes the Tiger is the protector of the forest. Find out about other Indian tribes that have a special connection with animals.

Answer

How to find out: look in your school library and in state tourism or tribal-welfare publications; ask an elder in your own community which animals, trees or groves are treated as sacred locally; and note the reason given, not just the name.

Sample answer — communities across India that protect particular animals:

Community	Where	The connection
Bishnoi	Rajasthan, Haryana	Protect the blackbuck and the chinkara, and refuse to cut green trees, as part of their religious code
Apatani	Ziro valley, Arunachal Pradesh	Keep fish in the flooded paddy fields and maintain sacred groves
Khasi and Jaintia	Meghalaya	Maintain sacred groves (law kyntang) where no plant or animal may be harmed
Bhil and Gond	Central India	Clan totems tied to particular animals and trees, which members of that clan will not harm
Toda	Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu	Sacred buffalo herds and sacred groves in the shola forests

Why it happens: a belief that an animal is sacred works, in practice, like a protected area. It keeps a population from being hunted out and keeps its habitat standing — which is why sacred groves are often the last patches of original forest left in a district. Communities living inside an ecosystem depend on it directly, and these customs are one of the ways that dependence became a rule.

Q3.

Pick a tree near your home or school. Observe it once a week for 4 weeks. Note any new leaves, flowers, fruits, or visiting birds and insects. Record your observations. You may even upload your findings to www.seasonwatch.in and become a young citizen scientist.

Answer

How to do it: choose one tree you can reach easily and identify it by name. Visit it on the same day of the week and the same time of day, so that your four readings can be compared. Spend ten minutes each visit. Record in a fixed format.

Sample record — a neem tree beside the school gate, March:

Week	New leaves	Flowers	Fruits	Visitors seen
1	A few, pale green	None	None	Ants on the trunk, 2 mynas
2	Many	Buds appearing	None	Honeybees, 1 squirrel
3	Full canopy	Open, in bunches	None	Many honeybees, a sunbird, 3 mynas
4	Full canopy	Fading	Tiny green fruits forming	Fewer bees, 2 bulbuls

What to conclude: the bees came when the flowers opened and left when they faded, and the fruits appeared only after the flowering. That is pollination happening in front of you — the insects carry pollen from the stamens to the carpels, and only then do fruits and seeds form. Upload the same table to www.seasonwatch.in, where it joins observations of the same species from all over India.

Tip: record "none" where you saw nothing. A blank means you forgot to look; "none" is data.

Q4.

Interact with farmers and record indigenous practices followed by them for sustainable farming. Create a sustainable herbal garden/natural farm at home or at school. It could be a group activity with students from different grades.

Answer

Part 1 — record the practices. Ask specifically about what farmers did before synthetic inputs became common, and why. Practices you are likely to hear about:

mixed cropping and crop rotation — a cereal with a pulse, so the soil is not drained of the same nutrient every year;
farmyard manure and compost pits; green manure crops ploughed back into the field;
seed saved from the best plants of the previous harvest;
neem leaf or neem cake, cow-dung slurry and ash used against pests;
bunds and field borders left uncut, and trees kept in and around the field;
sowing timed to the local rain, judged from birds, flowering trees or wind.

Part 2 — build the garden.

Choose a sunny patch and mark small beds with paths between them.
Make a compost pit for kitchen and garden waste; use only this compost to feed the beds.
Plant medicinal and kitchen herbs that grow easily where you live — tulsi, mint, ajwain, lemon grass, aloe, curry leaf, giloy, ashwagandha, coriander.
Mix the planting rather than making one bed of one plant, and add marigold along the edges — it brings pollinators and helps keep some pests away.
Mulch the beds with dry leaves to hold moisture and to feed the earthworms.
Use no synthetic fertiliser or pesticide at all. Water in the morning; keep a shallow water dish for birds and butterflies.
Keep a register: who waters on which day, what was planted when, and what visited the garden.

Why it happens: every one of these practices does what the chapter describes — it returns organic matter to the soil, keeps a variety of crops so pollinators and pest predators stay, and interferes as little as possible with the natural ecosystem. That is what makes it sustainable: the garden gets better with age instead of needing more input each year.

Q5.

Look at Fig. 12.21 to understand the different farming practices adopted by farmers or you may also visit a nearby farm with an elderly person to observe the same. List a few suggestions in your notebook to improve farming practices by adopting eco-friendly and sustainable techniques. You can also make posters or model and display while participating in school functions, science fairs or Krishi Mela.

Answer

What Fig. 12.21 shows: a farm that is doing several things at once, not one thing on all its land — vegetable beds with tomatoes and flowering plants, a fenced enclosure with a cow and goats, a fruit tree that a farmer and a girl are harvesting into baskets, hedges and grass between the plots, and the farmhouse. This is mixed farming: crops, trees and livestock together on the same holding.

Suggestions to note down:

Suggestion	Why it helps
Keep crops, fruit trees and livestock together, as in the figure	Dung from the animals becomes manure for the beds; crop residue becomes fodder. The waste of one part is the input of another — exactly how a natural ecosystem works
Rotate crops and grow more than one kind; avoid monoculture	Different crops use different nutrients and support different insects, so soil and pollinators both hold up
Compost all farm and kitchen waste; add farmyard manure	Restores humus and friendly microorganisms, so the soil binds together and resists erosion
Keep flowering plants and hedges along the borders	Shelters bees for pollination and beetles, spiders and birds that control pests naturally (Fig. 12.18)
Use drip or sprinkler irrigation and harvest rainwater	Reduces excessive groundwater extraction, which the chapter names as an unsustainable practice
Spray only after checking that pests have actually reached a damaging level	Fewer sprays means fewer resistant pests and more surviving natural predators
Keep trees on the field bunds	Roots hold the soil, shade lowers the temperature, and the trees give fruit, fodder and firewood without the forest being cut

For the poster or model: a good design shows the same farm twice — bare monoculture on one side, mixed farming with hedges, trees, compost and animals on the other — with arrows marking where the manure, the fodder and the pollinators travel. Invite agricultural scientists, farmers and experts to the display so the suggestions can be discussed with people who farm.

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