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The period between 1000 CE and 1700 CE witnessed profound political, social, and cultural changes. The Indian subcontinent experienced repeated invasions and wars accompanied by religious discrimination and social distress.

The word biome is made up of the word bio, derived from the Greek word bios, meaning ‘life’, and -ome, a suffix used in biology to denote a group of a specific type of biological constituents.

Life on Earth is powered by a constant flow of energy and matter. The Sun is the main source of energy. In addition, the Earth’s hot interior and chemical reactions in the air, water, and rocks also drive the flow of energy and matter.

The Earth is home to an enormous variety of life forms. This immense variety of living organisms is known as biodiversity. Biodiversity is essential for life on the Earth. Every organism plays a role in keeping nature stable and functioning.

Every organism has a definite life span - it is born, grows, matures, reproduces and eventually dies. Reproduction is a biological process by which living beings produce new individuals of their own kind.

Many properties of the elements are not retained when they form a compound. For example, hydrogen and oxygen are gases, whereas the substance formed when they combine is water, which is a liquid at ordinary temperatures.

Work is done by a force on an object, when the force displaces the object in the direction of the force.

Oceans cover most of our planet and conceal many secrets beneath their waters. Just as land has mountains, valleys, and plains, the ocean floor, too, has several landforms, together known as submarine relief or ocean relief.

Mixtures are classified as homogeneous or heterogeneous and also as solutions, suspensions, or colloids.

Management is the process of planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling the enterprise resources efficiently and effectively for achieving the goals of the organisation.

The Indian Constitution, which came into effect on 26 January 1950, has the dubious distinction of being the longest in the world. But its length and complexity are perhaps understandable when one considers the country’s size and diversity. At Independence, India was not merely large and diverse, but also deeply divided.

In the history of nationalism a single individual is often identified with the making of a nation. Thus, for example, we associate Garibaldi with the making of Italy, George Washington with the American War of Independence, and Ho Chi Minh with the struggle to free Vietnam from colonial rule. In the same manner, Mahatma Gandhi has been regarded as the ‘Father’ of the Indian nation.

Late in the afternoon of 10 May 1857, the sepoys in the cantonment of Meerut broke out in mutiny. It began in the lines of the native infantry, spread very swiftly to the cavalry and then to the city.

Colonial rule was first established in Bengal. It is here that the earliest attempts were made to reorder rural society and establish a new regime of land rights and a new revenue system.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about 85 per cent of the population of India lived in its villages. Both peasants and landed elites were involved in agricultural production and claimed rights to a share of the produce. This created relationships of cooperation, competition and conflict among them. The sum of these agrarian relationships made up rural society.

Vijayanagara or "city of victory" was the name of both a city and an empire. The empire was founded in the fourteenth century. In its heyday it stretched from the river Krishna in the north to the extreme south of the peninsula.

Some of the earliest bhakti movements (sixth century) were led by the Alvars (literally, those who are “immersed” in devotion to Vishnu) and Nayanars (literally, leaders who were devotees of Shiva). They travelled from place to place singing hymns in Tamil in praise of their gods.

Women and men have travelled in search of work, to escape from natural disasters, as traders, merchants, soldiers, priests, pilgrims, or driven by a sense of adventure.

The mid-first millennium BCE is often regarded as a turning point in world history: it saw the emergence of thinkers such as Zarathustra in Iran, Kong Zi in China, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece, and Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, among many others, in India.

In focusing on the Mahabharata, a colossal epic running in its present form into over 100,000 verses with depictions of a wide range of social categories and situations, we draw on one of the richest texts of the subcontinent. It was composed over a period of about 1,000 years (500 BCE onwards), and some of the stories it contains may have been in circulation even earlier.

There were several developments in different parts of the subcontinent during the long span of 1,500 years following the end of the Harappan civilisation. This was also the period during which the Rigveda was composed by people living along the Indus and its tributaries.

There were several archaeological cultures in the region prior to the Mature Harappan. These cultures were associated with distinctive pottery, evidence of agriculture and pastoralism, and some crafts. Settlements were generally small, and there were virtually no large buildings.

This chapter explores the concepts of demand, supply, and price determination and provides a glimpse of the outcomes of their interplay in real-world situations.

Some of our preferences are needs, such as essentials like food, water, and shelter, while others are wants, like gadgets, vacations, or luxury items. Human wants are unlimited and keep changing; for instance, people may want to upgrade from a bicycle to a motorbike and then to a car.

Elections are one of the most important processes for exercising democratic rights. Regular and periodic elections lie at the core of democracy.

Democracy is a form of government in which the source of power and authority lies with the citizens of the country, who elect their representatives through free and fair elections.

from at least the second millennium BCE, we begin to find literary sources - the Ṛig Veda being the earliest - that supplement archaeological evidence and provide insights into the social, political, cultural, and moral dimensions of the past.

The period before the development of writing is understood mainly through archaeological evidence, as written languages emerged at different times in different parts of the world.

When you look up in the sky, you might see the floating clouds, the sunshine, and feel a breeze as well. All of these are a result of a blanket of air surrounding the Earth, called the atmosphere. It is pulled down around the Earth by gravity, and is a mixture of gases in various proportions, vital for the survival of all living beings on the Earth.

The Earth’s surface is not consistent; it is constantly being transformed by powerful forces acting from within and on the surface of the planet. One of the most important ideas that explains these changes is the theory of plate tectonics, which describes how large pieces of the Earth’s crust move slowly over the molten mantle.

Human beings live in societies and depend on each other in many ways. Our lives are shaped by the environment, the institutions that govern us, the economic activities that meet our needs, and the traditions and ideas passed down through generations. Understanding these connections is the foundation of Social Science, which seeks to understand their intricate patterns and influences.

As members of a democratic country we may speak of such rights as the right to vote, the right to form political parties, the right to contest elections and so on. But apart from the generally accepted political and civil rights, people today are also making new demands for rights such as the right to information, right to clean air or the right to safe drinking water.

Just as we intuitively understand what love means even if we cannot explain all its different shades of meaning, we also have an intuitive understanding of justice even though we may not be able to define it precisely. In that sense justice is a lot like love.

In a democracy, it is not sufficient to have an elected government at the centre and at the State level. It is also necessary that even at the local level, there should be an elected government to look after local affairs.

Political maps of India have changed dramatically over the years. Boundaries of States have changed, names of States have changed, and the number of States has changed. When India became independent, we had a number of provinces that the British government had organised only for administrative convenience.

Many times, courts are seen only as arbitrators in disputes between individuals or private parties. But judiciary performs some political functions also. Judiciary is an important organ of the government.

Legislatures are elected by the people and work on behalf of the people. Legislature is not merely a law making body. Lawmaking is but one of the functions of the legislature. It is the centre of all democratic political process.

Legislature, executive and judiciary are the three organs of government. Together, they perform the functions of the government, maintain law and order and look after the welfare of the people.

In countries where representative democracy is practiced, elections and the representative character of those elections are crucial factors in making democracy effective and trustworthy.

It is a tribute to the wisdom and foresight of the makers of the Constitution that they presented to the nation a document that enshrined fundamental values and highest aspirations shared by the people. This is one of the reasons why this most intricately crafted document has not only survived but become a living reality, when so many other constitutions have perished with the paper they were first written on.

Rajiv Gandhi became the Prime Minister after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He led the Congress to a massive victory in the Lok Sabha elections held immediately thereafter in 1984. As the decade of the eighties came to a close, the country witnessed five developments that were to make a long-lasting impact on our politics.

1980s may be seen as a period of rising regional aspirations for autonomy, often outside the framework of the Indian Union. These movements frequently involved armed assertions by the people, their repression by the government, and a collapse of the political and electoral processes.

India was born as an independent nation-state in a very trying and challenging international context. The world had witnessed a devastating war and was grappling with issues of reconstruction; yet another attempt to establish an international body was underway; many new countries were emerging as a result of the collapse of colonialism; and most new nations were trying to come to terms with the twin challenges of welfare and democracy.

Almost everyone agreed that the development of India should mean both economic growth and social and economic justice. It was also agreed that this matter cannot be left to businessmen, industrialists and farmers themselves, that the government should play a key role in this.

The first few years in the life of independent India were full of challenges. Some of the most pressing ones concerned national unity and territorial integrity of India.

Globalisation as a concept fundamentally deals with flows. These flows could be of various kinds - ideas moving from one part of the world to another, capital shunted between two or more places, commodities being traded across borders, and people moving in search of better livelihoods to different parts of the world.

The mighty Himavant is ours-
there’s no equal anywhere on earth.
The generous Ganga is ours-
which other river can match her grace?
The sacred Upanishads are ours-
what scriptures else to name with them?
This sunny golden land is ours-
she’s peerless, let’s praise her!

When I was a girl of about twelve, I used to stay in a village in north Karnataka with my grandparents. Those days, the transport system was not very good, so we used to get the morning paper only in the afternoon. The weekly magazine used to come one day late. All of us would wait eagerly for the bus, which used to come with the papers, weekly magazines and the post.

A sequence is an ordered list of numbers. Each number in the list is called a term.

Probability is a type of measurement, similar to how we measure quantities like length, area, or volume. However, instead of measuring physical quantities, probability is used to measure the likelihood of events.