Incredible India
Some unique places
Place the islands, the mangroves, the Northeast and the Western Ghats on a journey across India, and say what makes each of them home to living things found nowhere else.
Shanti's family sets out from the southernmost tip of India — and it is not where she expected. Kanyakumari is the southernmost point of the Indian *mainland*, where three seas meet, but the southernmost tip of the country itself is Indira Point, out in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. An island is a land with water round each of its sides, and there are over a thousand of them in the seas around India.
Why an island holds birds nobody else has
The Andaman wood pigeon and the Andaman hornbill live in those island forests. Water round a place is a wall as much as a road: what arrives stays, and what grows up there grows up apart. A place where many of the plants and animals are found nowhere else is a kind of nature's hotspot — and India has more than one.
A forest standing in salt water
The Sundarbans is a mangrove forest, found where the river Ganga meets the sea and the land is muddy and salty. The stick-like roots poking up out of the water are how the mangroves breathe in that mud, and the same roots hold the soil together and stop the waves from washing the land away.
Kept safe on purpose
Protected areas are forests, rivers or hills kept safe by the government to protect animals, plants and nature; cutting trees and harming animals is not permitted in them. The Western Ghats have over 50 of them — wildlife sanctuaries, national parks and tiger reserves — and the lion-tailed macaque lives there and in no other range of hills.
Have a play
A mangrove standing in the shallow salt water of the Sundarbans, part by part.
Tap any part of the picture.
Worked example
Shanti rolls a sheet of newspaper into a thin tube, glues it and stands it on the table. It topples. What has that got to do with the island trees?
Look at why the tube falls. It is tall, it is thin, and it meets the table at a single small circle.
Everything holding it up is directly under it, so the smallest lean puts its weight outside that circle and over it goes.
Try it together
Work out why the Sundarbans mangroves grow roots that stick up above the water.
Shanti points at the tiny stick-like things poking out of the shallow water round the trees and asks her father what they are.
1.First, what are those stick-like things — a young shoot, or a part of the tree that usually stays hidden?
Have a go
Have a go on your own. Before boarding the ferry the family is told that each person must put on a life jacket, whether or not they can swim. What does a life jacket do for you if you fall in?
Ready to practise?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.