NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Social Science Chapter 8 The chapter's opening paragraph — In-text Questions

There is no single correct choice here — the economics lies in how you make it, not which way you go. The question is the chapter's first example of choice under scarcity: your pocket money is limited, both uses are attractive, and picking one means giving up the other.

Method. Set out the two uses, ask which is a need and which a want, and then state plainly what you give up either way — that is your opportunity cost.

Sample answer: I would save it for the shoes. My old shoes are torn and shoes are a need, while snacks are a want — and I can already eat at home. The opportunity cost of my decision is a month of snacks with friends, which is real and I do feel it. But the snacks give me a few minutes of pleasure each day and are then finished, whereas the shoes will be used every school day for a year. Since my pocket money is limited, I am choosing the use that gives me more value over the whole year for the same rupees.

This is scarcity in its purest form — 5 copies for 20 readers — so the library must adopt some rule for allocating them. The economic point is that any rule gives the book to some students and denies it to others, so the honest task is to compare the rules, not to pretend a painless answer exists.

The strongest answer combines two of them: use need-based priority for any student who needs the book for schoolwork, and a fixed-period rotation for the rest. Rotation is the key idea, because a book is not used up by being read — unlike food or fuel, the same five copies can serve all 20 students if the time each one holds them is limited.

Sharing first; buying more copies only if sharing still leaves real demand unmet. This is the second half of the same problem — instead of asking who gets the scarce copies, it asks whether the scarcity itself can be reduced.

Why sharing comes first. A storybook is not consumed by being read. Issuing each of the five copies for three days at a time lets all 20 students read it within about three weeks at zero extra cost. Sharing raises the use got out of the existing resource, which is precisely what “using resources efficiently” means in this chapter.

Why buying more is a separate decision. The school library has a limited budget, and money spent on ten extra copies of one storybook is money not spent on other titles, on magazines or on repairs. So:

If the book is set reading for a class, everyone needs it in the same fortnight and rotation cannot solve it — then buying more copies is the right call. If it is a popular story that students merely want to read, rotation is enough.

The crop whose value, after allowing for what growing it gives up, is highest for that particular field. This is the ‘what to produce’ question asked of a single farmer, and the chapter's answer is that it depends on the three conditions named — and on their opportunity costs.

So a farmer on well-watered land near a sugar mill may reasonably grow sugarcane, while a farmer in a low-rainfall region is better served by millets and pulses. The choice is not the same everywhere because the opportunity cost is not the same everywhere.

The farmer also has the option the PPC describes: grow some of each. A field split between a cash crop and a soil-improving crop earns part of the profit while keeping part of the long-term benefit — a point between the two ends of the curve rather than at either end.

Whichever mix produces the goods at lower cost given the prices, technology and product in front of it — there is no answer that is right for all firms. This is the ‘how to produce’ question, and the chapter lists four things that settle it.

That is why, as the chapter says, agriculture and handicrafts rely more on labour, whereas steel and automobile manufacturing depend more on machinery. The same garment manufacturer may run a machine line for plain shirts and a tailoring floor for designer wear — the two products call for different answers to the same question.

The government faces the same limited-budget problem as a household, so it cannot do both fully — and the chapter's tool for such a decision is opportunity cost.

Set the two out honestly. Highways move goods and people faster, lower transport costs, connect villages to markets and hospitals, and support trade and employment. Hospitals treat illness, reduce deaths and make a working population healthier and more productive. Both raise what the chapter calls “people's quality of life”, and government revenue comes from the same source — taxation.

What a good answer does instead of taking a side: it names the tests a government would actually apply.

• What is already there. A district with a good road network but no hospital within 50 km has a different answer from a district with the reverse.
• How many people are served, and how urgently. Health needs are often immediate; road benefits build up over years.
• Whether one supports the other. A hospital that patients cannot reach helps few people, and a highway serving an area with no health facilities does not save the lives an ambulance route would.
• Whether the choice must be all-or-nothing. Usually it need not be — the realistic decision is how to divide the budget, not which one to abandon.