Unseen Passage Worksheet with Answers

Screen Time: Servant or Master?

1 Walk into any Indian home in the evening and you will probably see the same picture. A child watches videos on a phone, a father reads the news on a tablet and a mother answers messages while the television plays in the background. Screens have become so common that we hardly notice how much time we spend looking at them.

2 There is no doubt that screens are useful. During the lockdown years, millions of students kept learning because of online classes. A farmer in a small village can check the price of onions without travelling to the market, and a girl in a town without a good library can read hundreds of books for free. Used wisely, a screen is a window to the world.

3 However, too much screen time brings problems. Doctors warn that children who stare at screens for hours complain of tired eyes and headaches. Many of them sleep late, because the bright light of a phone keeps the brain awake. Others stop playing outside, so they miss exercise and the joy of meeting friends face to face.

4 The problem is not the screen itself but the way we use it. A student who watches a lesson on fractions and then practises sums in a notebook is using technology well. A student who scrolls through short videos for three hours is simply wasting time. The difference lies in having a purpose.

5 Families can solve this problem together. Fixing a time limit, keeping phones away from the dinner table and switching off screens an hour before bed are small steps that really work. Parents should follow the rules too, because children learn more from what they see than from what they are told. If we control our screens instead of letting them control us, they will remain good servants and not become bad masters.

The Scientist Who Asked Why the Sea Is Blue

1 Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, known as C. V. Raman, was born on 7 November 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, in what is now Tamil Nadu. His father taught physics and mathematics at a college, so the house was full of books. Raman was a brilliant student, and he finished his degree in physics at Presidency College, Madras, while he was still very young.

2 In 1907 Raman joined the government's finance service in Kolkata. His days were spent in an office, but his evenings and holidays belonged to science. He did experiments at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, studying the sound of the violin and of Indian drums.

3 In 1921 Raman travelled to Europe by ship. As he looked at the deep blue sea, he began to wonder about its colour. Many people believed that the sea was blue only because it reflected the sky. Raman disagreed. After returning home, he showed that the colour comes from the way water scatters sunlight.

4 His studies of light led him to a new discovery in 1928. When a beam of light passes through a transparent material, a small part of it changes colour. This became known as the Raman Effect. For this work Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, and he became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in science. India celebrates National Science Day on 28 February, the day in 1928 when he announced his discovery.

5 Later, Raman worked at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, and in 1948 he set up the Raman Research Institute there. The Government of India gave him its highest award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1954. He died in 1970, but his curiosity still inspires young scientists.