NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Science Chapter 12 Project work — The Journey Beyond

Book page 251 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

Visit a nearby park or a water body. Observe the water body and its surroundings. Identify ten organisms and classify them into kingdoms.

Answer

Method: go early in the morning, carry a notebook, a hand lens and a small jar. For each organism record what you can actually see — number of cells is not visible, so record structure and work the kingdom out afterwards using Fig. 12.5.

Organism	What I observed	Kingdom
Green scum on the water surface	Slimy blue-green film; under the lens, fine filaments	Monera (cyanobacteria)
Curd from home, one drop	Tiny rods under high power; no nucleus visible	Monera (Lactobacillus)
Drop of pond water	Single cells swimming by cilia; a slipper shape	Protista (Paramecium)
Green single cells with an eyespot	Spindle-shaped, one flagellum, green	Protista (Euglena)
Mushroom on the damp bank	Umbrella-shaped, no green colour, growing on dead wood	Fungi
Mould on a fallen fruit	Cottony white threads with black dots	Fungi
Moss on the wet wall	Green mat, tiny leaf-like structures, no veins	Plantae (Bryophyta)
Water hyacinth / lotus	Roots, stem, broad leaves, flowers	Plantae (Angiosperm)
Dragonfly	Jointed legs, two pairs of wings, hard covering	Animalia (Arthropoda)
Frog / small fish	Backbone, moist skin or scales and fins	Animalia (Chordata, vertebrate)

Tip: add a column for "criterion used" and write which fork of Fig. 12.5 decided each row. That is what turns a nature walk into classification.

Q2.

Interview a gardener or a forest worker. Ask them how they identify species. Compare the traditional scientific methods of identification.

Answer

Method: take permission, ask open questions, and write down the local names exactly as they are spoken.

Questions worth asking: How do you tell this tree from that one when neither is in flower? Which part do you look at first — bark, leaf, smell? How did you learn? What do you call it, and does it have a different name in the next village? Which plants must never be confused, and why?

	Traditional / folk identification	Scientific identification
Characters used	Leaf shape, bark texture, smell, taste, latex, sound of the leaves, season of flowering, where it grows	The same visible characters, plus internal structure, cell structure, reproduction and DNA
Name	Local name, different from village to village and language to language	One binomial Latin name used worldwide
Recorded as	Memory, songs, sayings, passed down orally	Written keys, herbarium specimens, published descriptions
Strength	Fast, practical, includes uses and dangers; built on generations of observation of that exact place	Precise, universal, testable, and shows relationships between organisms
Weakness	Not transferable — the same name may mean two plants in two districts	Needs training and equipment; slower in the field

What the comparison shows: the two are not rivals. The chapter gives two examples of them working together — Hortus Malabaricus, compiled in the 17th century by Hendrik van Rheede with the help of Itty Achudan and other local experts, describing hundreds of plant species and their medicinal uses; and the folk taxonomy by which tribal communities distinguish edible from poisonous mushrooms. Traditional knowledge supplies the observations and the uses; scientific classification supplies the universal name and the framework of relationships.

Q3.

If you were studying the Pakke Tiger Reserve or any other bird sanctuary of your choice, how would you organise the information about the bird species?

Answer

Organise it the way a taxonomist does — one record per species, filed in the classification hierarchy, with fields that can be searched and counted.

What one record should hold:

Field	Example (Pakke)
Scientific name	Buceros bicornis
Common name / local name	Great Hornbill
Order · Family	Bucerotiformes · Bucerotidae
Identifying features	Very large; yellow casque and bill; black-and-white wing bars
Habitat within the reserve	Tall evergreen forest with large old fruiting trees
Food	Figs and other large fruits
Nesting	Natural cavity in a large old tree; minimum cavity size
Season and dates recorded	Breeding March – July; sighting dates
Location	Compartment / GPS point
Abundance and status	Number of individuals or nests; IUCN status
Evidence	Photograph, call recording, observer's name

How to arrange the records: group them by family and order first, because that is how field guides are built and it puts similar birds side by side — all four hornbills together. Then add cross-index lists by habitat type, by feeding habit and by season, so the same data can answer different questions. Keep the file in a spreadsheet so it can be sorted and counted.

Why this arrangement: a plain alphabetical list of 300 names cannot answer the questions the case study raises — how are species distributed within the forest, which plants and animals are closely linked. A record structured by classification and by ecology can. Notice too how much work the scientific name does: it is the one field that never changes and that lets your data be compared with anyone else's.

Q4.

Conduct a survey in a forest area near a village, identify edible and poisonous mushrooms with the help of indigenous knowledge of community resource person(s).

Answer

Safety first, and this is not a formality: never taste, and never collect a mushroom for eating on your own judgement. Go with a knowledgeable community resource person, wear gloves, and photograph rather than pick wherever possible.

Method

Meet the resource person first and record what they already know — which kinds are collected, when, from which trees or soil, and which are avoided.
In the forest, record for each mushroom: the substrate (dead log, living tree, soil, dung), cap shape and colour, whether the underside has gills or pores, presence of a ring on the stalk or a cup at the base, colour change on bruising, smell, and season.
Photograph the whole mushroom including the base — the base often carries the decisive feature and is lost if the stalk is snapped off.
Note the local name and any traditional use, and whether it is eaten, used as medicine, or considered poisonous.
Get every identification confirmed by an expert before it is written up as edible.

Sample record sheet

Local name	Where found	Description	Community says
(record as spoken)	On a dead sal log, after the first rains	Grey-brown cap 6 cm, gills white, no ring, no cup	Edible, collected and sold
(record as spoken)	On soil under bamboo	White cap, white gills, ring on stalk, cup at base	Poisonous — never eaten

Why this matters: the chapter records that wild edible mushrooms are a valuable dietary food with high nutritional and medicinal value, that communities including tribal communities in India possess traditional knowledge of the edible and poisonous kinds based on folk taxonomy, and that mushroom farming is becoming a promising livelihood because it needs minimal space, low investment and has a fast life cycle of 30 – 45 days. The survey is therefore a real piece of documentation, not an exercise — folk taxonomy is knowledge that is being lost, and writing it down preserves it.

Q5.

Collect and study the postal stamps of India and the world released over time on diversified flora and fauna. Based on your learning, make your own criteria and classify them. Organise a philately (collection of postage stamps) exhibition in your school and showcase your work in this exhibition.

Answer

Method: collect stamps (or good photocopies and printed images), mount each on a card, and write the organism's common name, scientific name where you can find it, the country and the year of issue.

Criteria you could classify them by — use more than one, and show the same stamps rearranged

By kingdom — Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia. Most stamps will fall in the last two, which is itself a finding worth displaying.
Within Plantae — Thallophyta, Bryophyta, Pteridophyta, Gymnosperm, Angiosperm.
Within Animalia — invertebrate phyla, then the five vertebrate groups: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.
By conservation status — endangered, vulnerable, or already extinct.
Endemic or widespread — a panel of Indian endemics (Nilgiri tahr, lion-tailed macaque, Nepenthes khasiana, Neelakurinji) makes a striking display.
By country and year — which shows how conservation concerns changed over time.

For the exhibition: one panel per criterion, with a short note saying which criterion you used and why. Add a "classify this one yourself" panel with three unlabelled stamps and the Fig. 12.5 key beside it, so visitors have to work.

What the exercise teaches: the same set of stamps produces a different arrangement under each criterion — exactly the discovery of Activity 12.1. Displaying two arrangements of the same collection side by side is the clearest way to show that the criterion, not the organism, decides the grouping.

Q6.

Investigate an extinct species and analyse how its disappearance impacted the organisms that depend on it, and how this affected the ecological balance of the ecosystem.

Answer

Method: choose one species, find out when and why it disappeared, then trace outwards — what ate it, what it ate, what it pollinated or dispersed, and what has happened to those since.

Worked example — the Asiatic Cheetah in India, declared extinct in the country in 1952

Question	Finding
What was it?	The fastest land predator of India's open grasslands and scrub; hunted blackbuck and chinkara
Why did it disappear?	Hunting, and the loss of open grassland habitat to cultivation
Who depended on it?	Scavengers such as vultures and jackals that fed on its kills
Effect on prey	With one specialist predator of open ground gone, herbivore numbers in some pockets are checked only by food and disease
Effect on vegetation	Unchecked grazing changes grassland composition, which in turn affects ground-nesting birds and insects
Effect on the habitat's status	Losing its flagship predator made the grassland easier to write off as "wasteland", and it was converted faster

The general pattern to bring out in your analysis: the chapter states it in one line — when one species disappears, others that depend on it may also decline in number and eventually also disappear. Losses spread along the links of the food web, and they spread slowly, so the full effect appears long after the species itself is gone. The species most likely to trigger such a cascade are top predators, keystone pollinators and seed dispersers — which is why the disappearance of large old trees and their hornbills in Activity 12.2 is treated so seriously.

Other good choices: the Dodo of Mauritius and the tambalacoque tree said to have depended on it; the Great Indian Bustard, not yet extinct but critically endangered, and the grassland that goes with it; the Sangai deer, declared extinct in 1951 and rediscovered in 1953.

Q7.

Study the diversity of farm animals used in different types of farming practices in various parts of the country.

Answer

Method: pick three or four contrasting regions, and for each record the animals kept, the breed names, what they are kept for, and the feature that suits them to that place. Talk to a farmer or a veterinary worker if you can.

Region / practice	Animals and breeds	Feature that fits the place
Thar desert, Rajasthan — pastoral	Camel (Bikaneri), Marwari sheep, Sirohi goat, Rathi cattle	Camels store fat in the hump and tolerate long periods without water; goats browse thorny shrubs
Ladakh, high Himalaya — pastoral	Yak, Changthangi (pashmina) goat, double-humped camel	Thick coat and large lungs for cold and thin air; pashmina undercoat is grown as insulation
Punjab and Haryana — intensive dairy	Murrah buffalo, Sahiwal and Hariana cattle	High milk yield; irrigation and fodder crops support heavy feeding
Kerala and coastal south — mixed smallholding	Vechur cattle (very small), Malabari goat, ducks in paddy fields	Small body needs less fodder in a humid climate; ducks eat pests among the rice
Eastern Himalaya and North East	Mithun, pigs, local poultry	Mithun forages in forest and needs no stall feeding

The point of the study: every one of these breeds is the same species as its neighbours — all the cattle are Bos indicus, all the goats Capra hircus. The diversity here is genetic diversity within a species, built up by farmers selecting over centuries for exactly the local conditions. That is the same argument the chapter's opening paragraph makes about crop varieties: diversity reduces the risk of failure and strengthens food security. Replacing all these breeds with one high-yielding one would raise output and destroy the reserve of tolerance to heat, drought, poor fodder and disease that they carry.

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