Gujarat State Exams

"Opportunities are... everywhere and so you must always let your hook be hanging." Augustine "Og" Mandino, writer The major problem with dating inventions earlier than the written word is that there are no first-hand accounts documenting their conception or use. Paleoarcheologists have the difficult task of piecing together the prehistory of man based on scraps of physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. The fishhook is one such ingenious conception of early man and is probably more important to the success of humans than most of us would suspect. The earliest examples of fishhooks so far found by archeologists date from around 35,000 B.C.E. Appearing well before the advent of metalworking, early fishhooks were fashioned from durable materials of organic origin such as bone, shells, animal horn, and wood. With the addition of a variety of baits on the hook, prehistoric man gained access, previously largely denied, to an more...

Introduction. Dr. Avul Pakir Jinulabdeen Abdul Kalam, an ex-President of India, a great scholar and a famous scientist is well-known as (he Missile-Man. He is a great personality, believing in simple living and hint) thinking. Birth and Childhood. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was born on 15th October, 1931, at a holy place Rameshvaram, in Tamil Nadu. He belonged to a middle class family. Since his childhood he was self-dependent by lure. While the children of his age-group were busy in playing different kinds of games, this man was selling newspapers. He did all this to  support his family financially. Education and Profession. Dr. Abdul Kalam got his primary ducation in Ramnath Puram. After that he completed his graduation from Joseph College in Tiruchilapatti. In 1958, Dr. Abdul Kalam started his professional career in Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO). After that, in 1963 he joined Indian Space Research Organization (1SRO) more...

The aneroid barometer is now a small, inexpensive, robust, accurate, lightweight, and portable instrument. It does away with the delicate glass tubes of weighty mercury and easily overturned reservoirs of the original instrument, relying instead on a sealed bellows-type flexible'" container. This container contracts or expands according to the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The pressure is displayed on the dial by a mechanically driven lever or pointer. This dial is usually fitted with a second pointer that can be set manually to indicate the current pressure. Thus the rate of pressure change can be assessed, as well as whether it is increasing or decreasing. The concept of the aneroid barometer was suggested by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1698 but the first working model was made and patented in 1843 by the French scientist and engineer Lucien Vidie (1805-1866). He developed the idea from his work on pressure-measuring manometers on more...

The soul of India lies in villages and in these villages live three-fourths of our countrymen. It means that the nation's  strength and prosperity are interlinked with the strength and prosperity of the villages. Hence, it is important to free the rural India from backwardness and poverty. It is a good sign that our government is trying its best to bring rapid and sustainable development in the rural areas. Education and removal of poverty are given top priority. Efforts are being made to enable the rural people to improve their living standards. Clean drinking water is very important for good health which is being made available in the  villages. Our villages are no more poor and dirty as they were in past. They have their own primary health centres, post offices and the schools. Primary education has been made free so that maximum number of the villages may be literate. more...

Exercise is to the body what reading is to the mind. A cultured mind, truly finds immense pleasure in reading. Reading makes a man perfect. By reading we get information, facts and knowledge of the affairs of the world. It is reading that broadens our outlook by removing narrow thinking. The books prescribed for our formal education do not sometimes provide pleasure to us. This is an obligation on us to read those books as we have to continue with our education. We are to go through them even though we may not like them. The books that provide us pleasure are the books of I our liking and interest. Therefore we should have a vast field  of good books for our knowledge. Good books are better than our best friends. Our friends may ditch us, they may leave us in the lurch, but books can never desert us. They more...

Only the visual and radio bands of the electromagnetic spectrum pass through Earth's atmosphere relatively unhindered. For everything else, gamma-ray. X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared, observations of space are much better from above Earth's atmosphere. The first real telescope in space was Orbiting Solar Observatory-1 (OSO-1), which was launched into a low Earth orbit on March 7, 1962, from Cape Canaveral. The lower portion rditated every two seconds, and the upper portion was fixed in space, using sun sensors and servomotors to point instruments accurately at the solar disc. The main aim was to observe solar flares—extremely violent explosions that occur near sunspots on the solar surface—in the gamma-ray, X- ray, and ultraviolet wavelengths. The spinning part of the spacecraft searched the whole sky for stellar gamma-ray sources. After three months and over 1,000 orbits the effectiveness of OSO-1 was greatly reduced when the United States tested a nuclear device at more...

Ragging means 'laughing at' or 'playing trick' on somebody. Sometimes, it may mean teasing somebody. In this sense, ragging is not very objectionable. However, ragging has become a threat to new students in some prestigious academic institutes. In the name of ragging, junior students are often subjected to physical and mental torture. Sometimes, students fall ill seriously and leave the institutions and give up their studies altogether. The Supreme Court has taken serious steps to curb this menace and has issued instructions to state governments to control ragging. Ragging causes serious illnesses and mental imbalance among the affected students. Every year, we hear of many deaths caused due to ragging. The raggers often contend that ragging helps a fresher to shake of his inertia and shyness and be smart. However, such tactful excuses cannot minimize the seriousness of the problem. Ragging should be banned in. the interest of a healthy more...

"This... revolutionary piece of technology ...has the potential to change people's lives." Anita Lifestone, Royal National Institute for the Blind Clinical trials were held in the United States in 2007 when seventy patients were fitted with a new device called the Argus II, which uses a camera connected to spectacles that feeds visual information to electrodes in the eye. In this trial, blind patients were able to see shape and movement. It seems that we could have a true "bionic eye" in the very near future. Prosthetics to restore vision have been researched since the 1950s. Usually ocular prosthetics consist of a thin, curved sheet—generally made of a type of glass called cryolite or medical grade acrylic—that is fitted over the existing nonfunctioning eye. More recently, however, researchers have been trying to restore vision to those who have lost it—although it is extremely difficult to give sight to people who- more...

Scout movement originated in Britain in 1908. Sir Baden Powell was its patron. Slowly the movement extended to every civilized country including India. It started as a trial experimental camp in 1907 but the movement spread with speed to almost every part of the world. In 1908, a handbook  "Scouting for Boys", was published. Over 1,00,000 scouts served in his majesty's forces during the First World War and 10,000 gave up their lives. These underage scouts performed public duties at home like coast-watching. When the war broke out again in 1939 thousands of scouts once more joined the armed forces. During this war, too, those scouts who were underage rendered particularly good service. Many of them were decorated for gallantry.   The principle underlying the boy scout movement is the development of good citizenship among the youth. Active self- expression is encouraged among the scouts and emphasis is laid upon more...

Global warming means the rise in the mean global temperature to a level which/ affects the life-forms on the earth surface. The factors responsible for this warming may be both natural and manmade. Warming of the globe due to natural factors is not an unusual phenomenon. The earth's climate is variable. For example, about 18,000 years ago, the Earth was about 5°C cooler than it is today. That was the last glacial period on the earth. Thereafter, the global temperature began to rise. The earth is kept warm due to what is known as the- green house effect. Without it the earth would be a frozen waste land. The short wave lengths or ultra violate radiation coming from the sun penetrates the atmosphere and   absorbed by the earth. This observed energy is also radiation back to space at infra-red wave lengths. The earth atmosphere contains gases which trap some more...