Q1 of 30 Page 32

Suppose you are one of the volunteers who went to the Andaman and The Nicobar Islands for relief work after the tsunami. You work in the relief camps, distributing food, water, and medicine among the victims. You listen to the various stories of bravery of ordinary people even as they fight against odds to bring about some semblance of normalcy in their lives. You admire their grit and determination. Write a diary entry.

28thDecember,2004


Today I was to go to the southwest part of the town, one of the worst-hit areas. As fixed earlier, I and three other volunteers were picked up by the rescue party van at six a.m. in the morning. A clean one hour journey and another hour of walk brought us to the horrible sight of death, despair and the hope called life. Every place where a hut stood earlier, were some muddy aftereffect, the stench of rotten bodies pervaded the whole place, and amidst all this, a sudden meowing had our attention. Soon we realized, it was coming from behind a huge tree. I asked the others to wait and worked my way to the back of the tree only to see a baby, alive and kicking, on a piece of clothing, nearly damp. Spellbound, I could only gesture the others to follow and they were equally dumbstruck. We could not imagine how a baby could survive a tsunami when its mother emerged and said she gave birth to her baby daughter on 26th December night, on that very tree. The mother was nearly unable to move since she had eaten nearly nothing for over two days and was feeding the baby who was equally weak. We all thanked God and started on with our duties. The mother later told us, she named her baby “Tsunami”.


More from this chapter

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2

Fill in the blanks in the sentences below (the verbs given in brackets will give you a clue).

(i) The earth trembled, but not many people felt the ______ (tremble)


(ii) When the zoo was flooded, there was lot of ______and many animals escaped


Into the countryside. (confuse)


(iii) We heard with ______That the lion had been recaptured. (relieve)


(iv) The zookeeper was stuck in a tree and his ______ was filmed by the TV crew. (rescue)


(v) There was much ______In the village when the snake charmer came visiting. (excite)

 3

Study the sentences in the columns A and B.























A



B



Meghna has swept away.



The waves swept Meghna away.



Almas’s grandfather was hit on the head



Something hit Almas’s grandfather on the head.



Sixty visitors were washed away.



The waves washed away the sixty visitors.



No animal carcasses were found.



People did not find any animal carcasses.



Compare the sentences in A to the ones in B. Who is the ‘doer’ of the action in every case? Is the ‘doer’ mentioned in A, or in B?


Notice the verbs in A: ‘was swept away’, ‘was hit’, ‘were washed away’, ‘were found’. They


are in the passive form. The sentences are in the Passive Voice. In these sentences, the


focus is not on the person who does the action. In B the ‘doer’ of he action is named. The


verbs are in the active form. The sentences are in the Active Voice.


Say whether the following sentences are in the Active or the Passive voice. Write A


or P after each sentence as shown in the first sentence.


(i) Someone stole my bicycle.


(ii) The tyres were deflated by the traffic police.


(iii) I found it last night in a ditch near my house.


(iv) It had been thrown there.


(v) My father gave it to the mechanic.


(vi) The mechanic repaired it for me.

 2

The story shows how a little girl saved the lives of many tourists when a tsunami struck the beach, thanks to the geography lesson that she had learnt at school. She remembered the visuals of a tsunami and warned her parents.

Do you remember any incident when something that you learned in the Did classroom help you in some way outside the classroom?


Write our experiences in a paragraph of about 90-100 words or narrate it to the a whole class like an anecdote.

 1

Find three or four phrases in stanzas one and two which are likely to occur in a geography lesson.