NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 7 Carrier of Words (prose) — Learning Beyond the Text

Book page 218–219 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

I. The unique ‘Daakroom’ carnival was conceptualised by the Ministry of Culture to re-introduce children and larger audiences to letter writing in innovative, creative, and engaging ways. It also hosted competitions and workshops around writing and post. The one-of-a-kind letter writing event, supported by India Post, Ministry of Culture, Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti is aimed to give a digital detox with the aim of reviving the art of letter writing in India. Source:

Answer

This item is a piece of information to read and act on rather than a question with one answer. Here is what it is saying, and what to do with it.

Term in the passage	What it means
‘Daakroom’	A letter-writing carnival — the name is built from daak (post) + room. The same carnival appears in this chapter’s listening transcript, where Bhavna explains: “Its name comes from the Hindi word ‘daak’ which means ‘post’.”
conceptualised	Thought up and planned — the idea stage, before the organising
digital detox	A deliberate break from screens and devices, so that attention returns to slower, physical things — here, pen, paper and post
Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti	The autonomous body that maintains Gandhi Smriti in New Delhi (the house where Mahatma Gandhi spent his last days) and runs educational and cultural programmes

Why a government body would revive letter writing at all. A letter is slow, and slowness is the point. You cannot delete a sentence after it is posted, so you choose it with care; you must hold one person in mind for a whole page; and what you write survives — bundles of letters are how families keep their own history. The carnival is not nostalgia for the post office. It is an argument that some kinds of attention only appear when the message cannot be recalled or edited — which is exactly the argument the poem in the second half of this chapter is making about words.

What to do with this item: hold a Daakroom of your own. Fix a day; ask every student to write one real letter to a real person and to post it with a stamp bought at the counter; run three short workshops — calligraphy, postcard design, and how to address an envelope with a PIN code; and put up the replies, when they come, on a class board. Note: the ‘Source:’ line is left blank in the printed book, so ask your teacher for the reference before you quote the passage anywhere.

Q2.

II. Did you know? The study of postage stamps and postal history is called philately. It is possible to be a philatelist without owning any stamps. The stamps that you study may be rare ones and found only in museums.

Answer

Philately is the study of stamps and postal history — not merely the collecting of them. That distinction is the whole point of the note, and it is why a philatelist need not own a single stamp.

Collecting	Philately
Acquiring and arranging stamps you own	Studying stamps as evidence — their design, printing, watermarks, perforations, postmarks, routes and the history they record
Needs money and possession	Needs a catalogue, a magnifying glass, a library and a museum
Question asked: ‘Do I have it?’	Question asked: ‘Why was it issued, and what does it tell us?’

Why a stamp is a historical document. A country puts on its stamps exactly what it wants remembered — a poet, a dam, a festival, an endangered bird, a centenary. Read a century of a nation’s stamps in order and you can see what it valued, and when it changed its mind. The postmark adds a second layer: date, place and route, which is postal history proper. A stamp in a museum can be studied by anyone; that is why philately is open to a student with no money at all.

Try this: India Post runs Philately Deposit Accounts and a Dak Ghar Niryat Kendra network, and most Head Post Offices have a philately counter and sell yearly stamp packs cheaply. A school can open one account and build a class album for the price of a few notebooks.

Q3.

II. 1. Study the postage stamps given below and discuss who or what they depict. [Five stamps: a portrait stamp of a woman, dated 1879–1949; a ₹5.00 stamp with the portrait of a man in a white hat; a ₹5.00 stamp captioned ‘तीज TEEJ’ showing women in festival dress under a crescent moon; a ₹4.00 stamp captioned ‘PAINTED STORK’; a ₹15.00 stamp showing a stone temple.]

Answer

Read from left to right; each stamp belongs to one of the categories listed in the next exercise.

Stamp	Who or what it depicts	Category
1. Portrait of a woman, with the dates 1879–1949 below	Sarojini Naidu — poet and freedom fighter, known as the ‘Nightingale of India’, President of the Indian National Congress in 1925 and the first woman Governor of an Indian state (United Provinces). The dates on the stamp are her birth and death years.	Personality
2. ₹5.00, a smiling man in a white hat	Kishore Kumar — the playback singer, actor, composer and director. (The caption is printed vertically in very small type; check the wording in your own copy.)	Personality
3. ₹5.00, captioned तीज TEEJ — women in bright ghagra-choli under a crescent moon, with green foliage and a swing	Teej — the monsoon festival kept especially in Rajasthan, Haryana and eastern Uttar Pradesh, marked by swings hung from trees, mehndi, green and red clothes and songs welcoming the rains	Celebration / festival
4. ₹4.00, a long-billed wading bird, captioned PAINTED STORK	The painted stork, a large wading bird of Indian wetlands — a definitive (everyday) stamp from a nature series	Nature
5. ₹15.00, a great stone temple in warm evening light	The Sun Temple at Konark, Odisha — the thirteenth-century temple built as the Sun God’s chariot, a UNESCO World Heritage Site	Our heritage

What the five together are meant to teach. They are not a random handful. Two people, one festival, one bird, one monument — the same five headings you are asked to research in the next exercise. Held side by side they show what a national stamp programme is: a country’s own list of what it thinks worth remembering — its artists, its seasons, its wildlife and its stone.

Q4.

II. 2. Work in groups of five. Find information about stamps on the following categories and note details as directed. · personalities: name and the field they belong to · celebrations: festivals/national events—name and significance · centenaries: name of person/occasion and significance · nature: name and significance · our heritage: monuments/music/dance—name and significance Now, prepare a class board on ‘Philately–Upholding Our Heritage’ with your findings.

Answer

This is a group project, so the work is yours — but the shape of it can be given, and a filled-in model helps you see what ‘note details as directed’ means.

Method:

One category per member of the group of five. Nobody researches two.
Find three stamps per category, and for each note exactly what the instruction asks — a name and a field or a significance, in one line. Add the denomination and year if the stamp shows them.
Sources: the philately counter of your Head Post Office, the India Post website, a stamp catalogue in the library, or an album at home. Check the spelling of every name against a second source.
For the board, use the same five headings across the top so the eye can compare. Under each stamp put one line only — a board is read standing up.
End with a strip along the bottom answering the board’s own title: how does philately uphold our heritage?

Sample entries (one per category — build the other two yourself):

Category	Stamp	Details as directed
Personalities	Sarojini Naidu	Field: literature and the freedom movement — poet, Congress President (1925), first woman Governor of an Indian state
Celebrations	Teej	Significance: the monsoon festival of Rajasthan and north India — swings, mehndi and songs that welcome the rains to a dry land
Centenaries	A stamp marking the 100th year of an institution or the birth centenary of a person	Significance: a centenary stamp fixes a date the country wants remembered; note the year of issue and count back a hundred years to find the occasion
Nature	Painted stork	Significance: a wetland bird whose survival depends on India’s lakes and marshes; nature stamps are often issued to draw attention to a threatened habitat
Our heritage	Sun Temple, Konark	Significance: a thirteenth-century temple carved as the Sun God’s chariot, with twenty-four wheels and seven horses; a UNESCO World Heritage Site

How to answer the board’s title in one line. ‘Philately upholds our heritage’ because a stamp is the cheapest object a country can put into every household. A monument stands in one place and a museum keeps its treasures behind glass, but a stamp of Konark travels in a schoolbag to a village that will never see Odisha. That is the sentence to put along the bottom of the board.

Q5.

III. In the past, telegram was a mode of fast communication, commonly used to quickly send short and specific messages, such as greetings and condolences. Its pricing structure was based on the number of words to be transmitted, and therefore, needed to be precise. The following form was used for sending such telegrams. [An INLAND TELEGRAM form, with boxes marked: Prefix · Handed in · FOR POSTAGE STAMPS (‘For Conditions of acceptance, see over’) · SERVICE INSTRUCTIONS · Charge · Chargeable Words · Actual Words · Counter Number · To … · ADDRESS · ‘If you wish to pay for a reply insert R.P. here’, and ruled lines for the message.]

Answer

Read the form as a machine for counting words. Almost every box on it exists because the sender was charged by the word.

Box on the form	What it was for
Handed in / Counter Number	Where and when the telegram was accepted — the record of the transaction
FOR POSTAGE STAMPS	The space where stamps were stuck to pay the charge
Actual Words and Chargeable Words	Two separate counts. Some words (parts of the address, service words) were not charged, so the clerk wrote both figures — the honest count and the billable one
Charge	The money due, worked out from ‘chargeable words’
SERVICE INSTRUCTIONS / Prefix	Codes for the operators — ordinary, express, or a special class of message
“If you wish to pay for a reply insert R.P. here”	R.P. = Reply Paid. The sender could pay in advance for the answer, so a poor family receiving the news could reply without spending anything
To … / ADDRESS	The recipient — written in full, because a wrong address could not be corrected once the wire had gone

How the pricing shaped the language. When every word costs money you drop everything a reader can supply for himself — articles, pronouns, polite framing, even punctuation (STOP was used for a full stop, and was itself a chargeable word only in some services). “I am very sorry to tell you that our father passed away this morning; please come at once” becomes FATHER EXPIRED COME SOON. Four words. The telegram is the only form of writing in which brevity was enforced by a price list — which makes it the perfect thing to meet just before a poem arguing that “A little said, and truly said, / Can deeper joy impart / Than hosts of words.”

Try this: take the condolence message you wrote in the Writing Task and compress it into a telegram of ten words or fewer, then read the two side by side. Ask yourself what was lost — and, more interestingly, what was not. India’s telegram service closed on 15 July 2013 after 162 years, so the form on page 219 is a museum piece; your grandparents will almost certainly remember receiving one.

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