NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Science Chapter 11 Project work — The Journey Beyond

Book page 227 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

Read about the ‘Seed Village Programme’ (Beej Gram Yojana) run by the Government of India. Why is it important to save indigenous seeds?

Answer

What the programme is. Under the Seed Village Programme, a village is selected and a group of its farmers is given foundation or certified seed at a subsidised rate, together with training in producing, cleaning, treating, storing and testing seed. The village then raises its own quality seed and supplies the surrounding villages, so good seed reaches the farmer locally and cheaply instead of having to be bought from far away every season.

Why indigenous (desi) seeds must be saved:

They are already adapted to the place. Generations of selection in the same soil, rainfall and temperature have left them suited to local conditions and to local pests — often with less water and less fertiliser than a new variety needs.
They are a reservoir of useful genes. Resistance to a disease that becomes serious in the future may exist today only in some old local variety. Once that variety is lost, the gene is lost with it and cannot be recovered.
The farmer can save and re-sow them. Indigenous varieties breed true, so a part of the harvest becomes next year's seed. Hybrid seed does not breed true and has to be bought afresh every season.
Diversity is insurance. If a whole region sows one variety and that variety fails, the whole region fails — the lesson of Question 7 applied to seed.
They preserve taste, nutrition and culture. Local rices, millets and pulses carry cooking qualities and nutritional value that uniform commercial varieties often lack.

Sample answer (2 – 3 sentences for your report): "The Seed Village Programme trains farmers to produce and store quality seed in their own village, so that good seed is available locally at a low price. Saving indigenous seeds matters because they are adapted to our own soil and climate, they can be saved and re-sown every year, and they hold resistance genes that we may need in the future. Losing them would leave us dependent on a few uniform varieties, and a single new disease could then affect the whole crop."

How to do it well: visit a nearby seed centre, Krishi Vigyan Kendra or a farmer who saves his own seed. Ask what varieties his grandparents grew and which of them are still sown. Photograph the seeds and label them.

Q2.

Prepare a report on IVF, its uses and drawbacks. Discuss it with your class.

Answer

What IVF is. In in-vitro fertilisation, an egg and a sperm are brought together outside the female body, usually in a culture dish in a laboratory. The fertilised egg is allowed to divide for a few days and is then implanted in the uterus, where the pregnancy continues normally. A baby born this way is popularly called a "test tube baby", though the fusion actually happens in a dish, not a test tube.

India's place in the story. In 1978, Subhash Mukhopadhyay of Kolkata pioneered India's first test tube baby, Kanupriya Agarwal (nicknamed Durga), through experimental IVF work. Earlier in this chapter you also meet P. Maheshwari, the 'Father of Indian Embryology', who developed in-vitro fertilisation in flowering plants by fusing an egg and a male gamete in a test tube to create new hybrids.

Uses	Drawbacks
Helps couples in whom the oviducts are blocked, so the sperm and egg cannot meet naturally	Expensive — often beyond the reach of an ordinary family, and several attempts may be needed
Helps when sperm count or sperm movement is low	Physically demanding — hormone injections, repeated scans and minor procedures
Helps when eggs are not released regularly	Emotionally stressful, especially when a cycle fails
Allows fertility to be preserved before treatments such as chemotherapy	Success is not guaranteed; the chance per attempt falls markedly with the woman's age
Can avoid passing on certain serious inherited disorders	Higher chance of twins or triplets, and so of premature and low-birth-weight babies
Has advanced our understanding of early human development	Raises questions about what to do with unused embryos, and can be misused for sex selection — which is illegal in India

How to structure the report: (1) what IVF is, in three sentences; (2) the steps, from hormone treatment to egg collection, fertilisation in the dish, and implantation; (3) a table of uses against drawbacks like the one above; (4) the Indian story — Subhash Mukhopadhyay, 1978, and why his work went unrecognised in his lifetime; (5) the law — prenatal sex determination is prohibited in India, and why that matters for the sex ratio; (6) your own conclusion.

For the class discussion: a good question to open with is — should a technique this expensive be available in government hospitals? Ask the class to argue both sides before deciding.

Q3.

Conduct a survey on crop fields. Interact with farmers on the crops grown on their farms and farm animals based on the following points — (i) Which crops do they grow through vegetative propagation? (ii) Which crops do they grow using seeds? (iii) Which seeds do they use — indigenous varieties or hybrid varieties? Why? How do they develop hybrid varieties in their fields? (iv) List the indigenous breeds and hybrid breeds of the farm animals they are using in their farming practices and how are they different from each other? (v) Discuss in class, and make a report on how asexual and sexual methods of reproduction are useful in agriculture.

Answer

How to run the survey. Prepare the five questions in advance, visit three or four farms so that you can compare answers, take notes on the spot rather than from memory, photograph the crops and animals with permission, and thank the farmers. Then tabulate before you write.

Point	What to look for	Typical answers you will get
(i) Vegetative propagation	Crops planted from a part of the plant, not from seed	Sugarcane (setts), potato (tubers), ginger and turmeric (rhizomes), banana (suckers or tissue-culture plantlets), mango and citrus (grafts), rose and hibiscus (cuttings)
(ii) Seed crops	Crops sown from seed each season	Wheat, rice, maize, mustard, gram, arhar, groundnut, most vegetables
(iii) Indigenous or hybrid seed	Which, and why	Hybrid for higher yield and disease resistance, but must be bought fresh every year; indigenous for taste, storage, lower input cost and because the farmer can save his own seed
(iv) Animal breeds	Indigenous vs crossbred	Indigenous — Sahiwal, Gir, Tharparkar cattle, Murrah buffalo; crossbred — Holstein Friesian and Jersey crosses. Indigenous breeds tolerate heat and disease and need less care; crossbreds give more milk but need better feed, shelter and veterinary care

On (iii), how a hybrid is made. Most farmers buy hybrid seed rather than making it, and it is worth explaining to them (and in your report) how it is produced: the anthers are removed from the flowers of one parent line before they mature, the flower is bagged to keep out stray pollen, and pollen from the chosen second parent is transferred by hand. That is the artificial hybridisation described in the chapter, and it is exactly the situation of exercise Question 1.

Sample conclusion for (v): "Asexual methods are used where the farmer wants many identical plants of a variety he has already chosen — sugarcane, potato, banana, mango. They are quick, they keep the variety exactly, and for banana and sugarcane they are the only option. Sexual methods are used where seed is needed — wheat, rice, pulses — because seed stores and travels easily and because crossing two parents produces new varieties with higher yield and better disease resistance. Farmers use both: asexual reproduction to multiply what works, and sexual reproduction to create what is new."

Q4.

Explore the crop fields near your school and find out different pollination strategies adopted by different cereal and vegetable crop plants. Talk to farmers on the following points — (i) Pollinators of different crops (ii) Reason for the declining population of pollinators and their solutions. Observe the pollinators visiting your school garden. Notice and record their activity. Let each student take pictures of at least five different types of pollinators and which plants they visit. Compile the data and showcase your work to discuss how pollination occurs in different plants.

Answer

How to observe. Pollinators are busiest between about 8 and 11 in the morning. Choose one flowering plant, sit still about a metre away and watch it for ten minutes. Record the visitor, the time, how long it stayed, and which part of the flower it touched. Repeat on a different plant. Do not chase or catch the insects — photograph them.

Crop / plant	Pollination strategy	Pollinator or agent	Clue you can see
Wheat, rice, maize	Wind	None — air currents	Small green flowers, no scent, huge quantities of dry powdery pollen, long feathery stigma
Mustard, sunflower, pumpkin, cucumber	Insect	Honeybees, bumblebees, butterflies, hoverflies	Bright petals, scent, nectar, sticky or spiny pollen
Tomato, brinjal, chilli, pea, wheat	Self	The flower's own anthers	Anthers around the stigma, or pollination completed before the flower opens
Papaya, some gourds	Cross (necessarily)	Moths, insects, wind	Male and female flowers on separate plants
Coral tree, hibiscus	Bird	Indian white-eye, sunbird	Large, sturdy, brightly coloured flowers with plenty of nectar
Vallisneria, Hydrilla	Water	Water currents	Aquatic plants; pollen carried on the water surface

(ii) Why pollinators are declining, and what can be done.

Reason	Solution the farmer or the school can act on
Heavy or careless pesticide spraying, especially during flowering	Spray in the evening when bees are not flying; use recommended doses; prefer integrated pest management
Loss of hedges, weeds and wild flowers, so nothing flowers between crops	Keep flowering hedges and field margins; sow a strip of mustard or sunflower
Large single-crop fields that flower for only a few weeks	Grow mixed crops and stagger sowing so something is in flower for longer
Loss of nesting sites	Leave some bare soil and dead wood; put up bee hotels
Climate change shifting the flowering season out of step with the insects	Keep managed bee colonies, as in the apple orchard of exercise Question 12

How to present it: a chart with the five photographs, each labelled with the pollinator, the plant it visited, the date and the time. Underneath, one sentence on how each flower's structure suits its visitor. Finish with the class's own suggestion for making the school garden more pollinator-friendly.

Q5.

Assist your elders in cutting fruits in the kitchen. While cutting fruits like lady finger, tomato, brinjal, capsicum, papaya, orange, muskmelon and more, make your observations based on the following and draw diagrams — (i) When you cut a fruit longitudinally (Longitudinal Section: L.S.) (ii) When you cut a fruit transversely (Transverse Section: T.S.) (iii) Attachment of seeds. Link your observations of the L.S. and T.S. of the fruit with the internal structure of the ovary of same species.

Answer

The point of the exercise, stated first: the fruit is the ripened ovary and the seeds are the ripened ovules. So whatever arrangement you find inside the fruit must already have been present in the ovary of the flower — only much smaller. Cutting the fruit is a way of seeing the ovary enlarged.

Fruit	T.S. shows	How the seeds are attached
Lady finger (bhindi)	Five clear chambers arranged like a star	Seeds in rows along the central angle of each chamber
Tomato	Two to four chambers filled with pulp	Seeds on a fleshy central mass, embedded in jelly
Brinjal, capsicum	Chambers around a central core	Capsicum: seeds crowded on a central core with the chambers otherwise hollow
Papaya	One large central cavity	Black seeds attached all round the inner wall
Orange	8 – 12 wedge-shaped segments	A few seeds towards the inner angle of each segment
Muskmelon	Three chambers	Seeds in the central cavity, held in fibrous pulp

Why the L.S. and the T.S. tell you different things: the transverse cut, made across the fruit, shows how many chambers there are and how they are arranged around the centre. The longitudinal cut, made from stalk to tip, shows how the seeds are ranged from top to bottom and where they are attached along the wall. You need both views to describe the inside of a fruit, exactly as you needed both cuts of the ovary in Activity 11.5.

How to make the link explicit in your notebook: draw the T.S. of a tomato fruit and, beside it and to a larger scale, the T.S. of a tomato ovary from a flower on the same plant. Number the chambers in both. They will match. Write one line under the pair: "the ovary became the fruit and each ovule became a seed" — that single sentence is what the whole project is designed to let you say from your own observation.

Tip: use a sharp knife with an adult present, and cut away from your body. Wash the seeds, dry them on paper and stick a few beside each drawing.

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