Reading Comprehension
Text I
You have read how Wanda was passionate about her talent and pursued it in spite of so many hurdles. Wangari Mathai, the Nobel Prize winner, is another person who fought a battle to save the environment. She had a humble start but she dreamt big and succeeded.
Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.
When we said we wanted to plant fifteen million trees, a forester laughed and said we could have as many seedlings as we wanted because he was convinced that we could not plant that many trees. Before too long, he had to withdraw that offer because we were collecting more trees than he could give away free of charge. But we didn’t have the money. We decided that we could produce the seedlings ourselves. We would go and collect seeds from trees, come back and plant them the way women planted other seeds — beans, corn, and other grains. And so the women actually developed forestry management techniques, using “appropriate technology” to fit their needs. Here is the basic method — take elevated position so that the chickens and the goats don’t come and eat the seedlings.
Ordaining all the inventive techniques that the women developed, for example, sometimes trees produce seeds carried by the wind. These germinate in the fields with the first rain. It was very interesting to see a woman cultivating a field with a small container of water. But, she was cultivating weeds! She had learned that among these weeds were also tree seedlings and that she could pick the seedlings and put them in a container. In the evening, she went home with several hundred seedling trees!
These techniques developed by the women became extremely helpful. We planted more than twenty million trees in Kenya alone. In other African countries, we have not kept records.
Trees are alive, so we react to them in very different ways. Quite often, we get attached to a tree, because it gives us food and fodder for our fires. It is such a friendly thing. When you plant a tree and you see it grow, something happens to you. You want to protect it, and you value it. I have seen people really change and look at trees very differently from the way they would in the past. The other thing is that a lot of people do not see that there are no trees until they open their eyes, and realise that the land is naked.
Click on the below link to download NCERT Class 10 English Words and Expressions 2 The Hundred Dresses 2
