GK Questions NCERT Solutions (Part-47)

CORRECT ANSWER – 3500 years ago

You may have heard about the Vedas. There are four of them – the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda.

The oldest Veda is the Rigveda, composed about 3500 years ago. The Rigveda includes more than a thousand hymns, called sukta or “well-said”. These hymns are in praise of various gods and goddesses. Three gods are especially important: Agni, the god of fire; Indra, a warrior god; and Soma, a plant from which a special drink was prepared.

CORRECT ANSWER – Indo-European

Sanskrit is part of a family of languages known as Indo-European. Some Indian languages such as Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri and Sindhi, and many European languages such as English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish belong to this family. They are called a family because they originally had words in common.

Take the words ‘matr’ (Sanskrit), ‘ma’ (Hindi) and ‘mother’ (English). Do you notice any similarities? Other languages used in the subcontinent belong to different families. For instance, those used in the north-east belong to the Tibeto-Burman family; Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam belong to the Dravidian family; and the languages spoken in Jharkhand and parts of central India belong to the Austro-Asiatic family

CORRECT ANSWER – Dasas or Dasyus

Sometimes, the people who composed the hymns described themselves as Aryas and called their opponents Dasas or Dasyus. These were people who did not perform sacrifices, and probably spoke different languages.

Later, the term dasa (and the feminine dasi) came to mean slave. Slaves were women and men who were often captured in war. They were treated as the property of their owners, who could make them do whatever work they wanted. While the Rigveda was being composed in the north-west of the subcontinent, there were other developments elsewhere. Let us look at some of these.

CORRECT ANSWER – 3000 years ago

The practice of erecting megaliths began about 3000 years ago, and was prevalent throughout the Deccan, south India, in the north-east and Kashmir.

CORRECT ANSWER – Brahmagiri

Archaeologists think that objects found with a skeleton probably belonged to the dead person. Sometimes, more objects are found in one grave than in another. Find Brahmagiri.

Here, one skeleton was buried with 33 gold beads, 2 stone beads, 4 copper bangles, and one conch shell. Other skeletons have only a few pots. These finds suggest that there was some difference in status amongst the people who were buried. Some were rich, others poor, some chiefs, others followers.

CORRECT ANSWER – 2000

About 2000 years ago, there was a famous physician named Charaka who wrote a book on medicine known as the Charaka Samhita.

There he states that the human body has 360 bones. This is a much larger number than the 200 bones that are recognised in modern anatomy. Charaka arrived at this figure by counting the teeth, joints and cartilage.