NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 7 Technology paving the way for accessing knowledge, skills, and job opportunities — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 178 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Can you think of some technological advancements that have impacted the lives of people and communities around you? Talk to elders at home and in the neighbourhood about it.

Answer

How to get a real answer out of the elders. Do not ask “has technology changed life?” — everyone says yes. Ask about a specific task and a specific time:

How did you send money to a relative in another town before?
Where did you get water, and how long did it take?
What did you cook on, and who collected the fuel?
How did you find out that a job was available, or that a relative was ill?
What did the family do when someone fell sick at night?

Advancement	What changed for the community
Mobile phones and UPI	A migrant worker sends money home the same evening instead of travelling with cash; a vegetable vendor takes payment without change
LPG connections	Hours a day saved collecting firewood — mostly by women and girls — and much less smoke indoors
Electricity, and now solar panels and LED lights	Study hours after dark; refrigeration for a shop; a pump for irrigation
Tube wells, drip irrigation, tractors, threshers	More output per worker in farming — the chapter’s point that increased machine use in agriculture lowers dependence on labour
Advance weather alerts and GPS	Farmers plan operations; transporters find the shortest routes
Online learning and telemedicine (Fig. 7.22)	A course or a specialist opinion reaches a village that has neither a college nor a hospital
SWAYAM and the National Career Service	Free courses from Grade 9 onwards in robotics, aquaculture, textile printing; job listings from plumbing to accounting

Sample answer: “My grandmother said the biggest change in her lifetime was not the phone but the bus route and the tar road. Before it, a sick person was carried on a cot to the main road. After it, the primary health centre became reachable in twenty minutes, girls began going to the high school in the next town, and vegetable growers could send produce to the market the same morning instead of selling it cheap in the village. One piece of infrastructure changed health, education and income together.”

Be fair to both sides. The same interviews usually turn up losses too — the village weaver who could not compete with mill cloth, the letter-writer whose work vanished, the tank that dried up when everyone drilled borewells. The chapter itself insists on this balance: technology is an enabler, but page 180 reminds us that production can degrade the very resources it uses. A good report records both.

Q2.

Think of an invention that you would like to make to solve a problem. Write down its related information on a piece of paper, such as its name, what it does, and how it works, sketches or drawings of what it would look like, and so on. Discuss with your classmates.

Answer

Start from a problem you have actually watched somebody have, not from a gadget you would like to own. That is the order Fig. 7.16 puts it in — an entrepreneur first “identifies a problem”, and only then finds an innovative solution.

What your page must contain — use these seven headings:

The problem, in one sentence, and whose problem it is.
Name of the invention.
What it does — the promise, in one line.
How it works — the steps, in order.
A labelled sketch. Label the parts, not just the outline.
Inputs it would need to be made — go through land, labour, capital, entrepreneurship and technology. This is the part most students skip and the part this chapter is testing.
Who would buy it and at roughly what price, and what could go wrong.

Sample answer — the ‘Thanda Thela’, a solar cold-box for a vegetable cart

Problem: the fifteen vegetable vendors in our locality (see the table on page 165) throw away a part of their leafy vegetables every evening because they wilt in the sun. Their entire stock is a perishable that they cannot store.
What it does: keeps about 30 kg of leafy vegetables at roughly 10 °C on the cart itself, all day, with no electricity connection.
How it works: a 100-watt flexible solar panel forms the roof of the cart. It charges a small battery, which runs a 12-volt fan blowing air across a tray of ice slabs inside an insulated box; a simple thermostat switches the fan off when the box is cold enough. A drain pipe takes the melt-water into a bottle so nothing drips on the road.
Inputs: land — no plot needed, but the aluminium, plastic and silicon in it all come from minerals; labour — a fabricator to bend the frame, an electrician to wire the panel; capital — the panel, battery, fan, insulated box, and about ₹12,000 to build one; entrepreneurship — I would build five, lend them to vendors free for a month and charge rent afterwards; technology — solar photovoltaics and a thermostat.
Who buys it and what could go wrong: vendors will pay only if it saves more than it costs, so the whole idea stands or falls on one number — how much stock they currently lose. If that is under ₹50 a day, the invention fails, and the honest thing is to find that out before building it.

Why the last bullet is the most important one: an entrepreneur “takes risks by investing money and time”, and the cheapest way to reduce that risk is to test the assumption before spending. Ten minutes spent asking three vendors what they throw away is worth more than a beautiful drawing.

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