Our Environment
Different lands, different lives
Tell plains, desert, coast and mountains apart from their plants, houses and weather, and place a dish, a festival or a landmark in the land it belongs to.
Four children came back from the holidays with four different countries in their heads, and none of them had left India. Gurpreet had been to Amritsar, where the fields go on to the horizon. Ritika had been to the Rajasthan desert. Chandni had been to a beach in Odisha. Nayan had been to the mountains of Sikkim.
The land sets the table
What people eat, what they wear, what they build their houses out of and what they celebrate are not chosen at random. Each of them is an answer to the land: to how much rain falls, how cold the nights get, what grows, and what can be carried in and out.
Have a play
Four kinds of land side by side: mountains, plains, desert and coast.
Tap any part of the picture.
Worked example
Somebody shows you a photograph of a place with a cactus, a khejri tree and no water in sight. What kind of land is it, and what will the houses be like?
Read the plants first. Cactus, khejri and babool are the three the chapter names for one kind of land.
Plants cannot move away, so what is growing tells you what the weather is like over a whole year, not just today.
Try it together
Let us collect three names from three corners of the country, together.
Each of these belongs to one of the four lands, and each one is a name worth carrying away.
1.From Gangtok, the locals took Nayan's family to a spot to see one snow-capped mountain in particular. Which one?
Have a go
Your turn. What is the Jaisalmer Fort like, and why is it famous beyond Rajasthan?
Ready to practise?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.