Advertisements
Advertisements
Question
There is mention of three communities in the story: the Marathas, the Mughals, the Anglo-Indians. Which language do you think they used within their communities and while speaking to the other groups?
Solution
The Muslims were Urdu speaking, the Marathas spoke Marathi, while the Anglo-Indians generally used English to speak with their communities. But while interacting with other groups they must have used the local dialect of Hindustani.
APPEARS IN
RELATED QUESTIONS
Answer any three of the following questions in 30-40 words each:
(a) What did M. Hamel tell them about the French language? What did he ask them to do and why?
(b) Why does Asokamitran call Subbu, ‘a charitable and improvident man’?
(c) How did the instructor turn Douglas into a swimmer?
(d) Why did Sophie like her brother, Geoff more than any other person?
Chimps making their own fishing rods is an indication that
The author’s grandmother was a religious person. What are the different ways in which we come to know this?
Read the text below and summarise it.
The Great Desert Where Hippos Once Wallowed
The Sahara sets a standard for dry land. It’s the world’s largest desert. Relative humidity can drop into the low single digits. There are places where it rains only about once a century. There are people who reach the end of their lives without ever seeing water come from the sky.
Yet beneath the Sahara are vast aquifers of fresh water, enough liquid to fill a small sea. It is fossil water, a treasure laid down in prehistoric times, some of it possibly a million years old. Just 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a much different place.
It was green. Prehistoric rock art in the Sahara shows something surprising: hippopotamuses, which need year-round water.
“We don’t have much evidence of a tropical paradise out there, but we had something perfectly liveable,” says Jennifer Smith, a geologist at Washington University in St Louis.
The green Sahara was the product of the migration of the paleo-monsoon. In the same way that ice ages come and go, so too do monsoons migrate north and south. The dynamics of earth’s motion are responsible. The tilt of the earth’s axis varies in a regular cycle — sometimes the planet is more tilted towards the sun, sometimes less so. The axis also wobbles like a spinning top. The date of the earth’s perihelion — its closest approach to the sun — varies in cycle as well.
At times when the Northern Hemisphere tilts sharply towards the sun and the planet makes its closest approach, the increased blast of sunlight during the north’s summer months can cause the African monsoon (which currently occurs between the Equator and roughly 17°N latitude) to shift to the north as it did 10,000 years ago, inundating North Africa.
Around 5,000 years ago the monsoon shifted dramatically southward again. The prehistoric inhabitants of the Sahara discovered that their relatively green surroundings were undergoing something worse than a drought (and perhaps they migrated towards the Nile Valley, where Egyptian culture began to flourish at around the same time).
“We’re learning, and only in recent years, that some climate changes in the past have been as rapid as anything underway today,” says Robert Giegengack, a University of Pennsylvania geologist.
As the land dried out and vegetation decreased, the soil lost its ability to hold water when it did rain. Fewer clouds formed from evaporation. When it rained, the water washed away and evaporated quickly. There was a kind of runaway drying effect. By 4,000 years ago the Sahara had become what it is today.
No one knows how human-driven climate change may alter the Sahara in the future. It’s something scientists can ponder while sipping bottled fossil water pumped from underground.
“It’s the best water in Egypt,” Giegengack said — clean, refreshing mineral water. If you want to drink something good, try the ancient buried treasure of the Sahara.
Staff Writer, Washington Post
How does the ‘assortment of remarks’ compiled by the author give us an understanding of the ways of science and poetry?
How does the connection drawn between the tail and the eyes add to the descriptive detail of the poem?
How has the poet brought out her emotional attachment to her mother tongue?
Read the story and complete the following.
Revathi won the prize for the ‘Best plant’ because, ____________.
Pick out some sentences from the lesson that convey a general truth.
Pick out the statements which aptly depict the theme of the poem.
- In the poem, the speaker memorises the past.
- In ‘The Planners’ the poet describes the unstoppable force of modernisation.
- The poet talks about the replacement of natural environment by the concrete jungle.
- The poet proposes to stop modernisation.
- The poet laments helplessly.
Fill in the gap, choosing a word from the bracket to make an appropriate comparison.
(tall / quiet / humble / merry / busy / slippery / fast / sly / slow / big)
as ______ as an elephant
Read the given words and share with your friend what comes to your mind.
Rewrite the poem in the form of a prose passage.
Bassanio borrowed money from Shylock in Antonio’s name.
Visit a library:
Find and read stories and poems written by Edith Nesbit.
Write out a few things that you would really miss about your home if you were to stay away from it for long.
Guess the meaning of the following word.
fruitless
Write other meaningful words that begin/end with stepmother.
What are search engines?
Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ibn Battuta, Amerigo Vespucci, Xuanzang, Ferdinand Magellan, Bartolomeu Dias, Herodotus, Captain James Cook, Vasco De Gama.
What is common among these individuals? Browse Internet or refer books and share some information about them.
Can a courageous man be defeated? Why?
Who is Raj?
A tiny bird looked for a place to lay her eggs.
| Mr. Murugan is a farmer. He has a small piece of land and two bulls. He takes good care of his bulls as they help him in farming. Every morning, he takes the bulls for grazing. When it rains he ploughs the land with the bulls. As he has no one to help he starts sowing the seed before sunrise. He irrigates the crop till it grows. He reaps and binds the crop then takes it to thrash the paddy. Finally, with the help of the bulls, he takes the paddy to his house. |
Name the actions of Murugan.
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Flag day is observed on the _________.
Match the rhyming words.
| mars | crime |
| bed | cars |
| time | head |
______was with Robinson.
Why do the leafcutter ants grow the fungus?
He got an admission to study at Stanford University ______.
What did the boy wonder about?
