Grammar - Articles Prepositions Conjunctions Determiners question bank (Language I (English))

Water is the core of life; hence water must be central to our spiritual thinking. Water is not only most of earth, but also most of life. Therefore water conservation must be our deepest concern.

The Himalayan mountain range is among the highest, youngest and most fragile ecosystem of the planet. The Himalayas have given us some of the great river systems of the earth including the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Nu Salween, Yangtze and the Mekong. The Himalayas are also called the 'Third Pole', for they contain the largest mass of ice and snow outside the earth's polar region, the north and south poles. There is a permanent snowline above 5,000 metres. Some of the glaciers in the region are the longest outside the two poles.

The Himalayas serve as water towers, providing water on a sustained basis to more than 1,000 million people and millions of hectares of land in South Asia. The greenery, benevolent climate, highly productive ecosystems, food production and overall happiness in South Asia are in fact, attributable to the bounty of the Himalayas. They are not only beautiful; they are life-givers. Little wonder that they are venerated as the abode of gods.

To keep the Third Pole preserved through assured conservation is one of the greatest challenges for the contemporary world. Himalayan mountains are a common but fragile natural resource. As mountain ecosystems have enormous bearing on the earth's systems, their special care, regeneration and conservation of their pristine resources would only bring more happiness, peace and prosperity to large parts of the world. In Agenda 21, Chapter 13 of the United Nations, the importance of mountains is underlined : "mountain environments are essential to the survival of global ecosystems."

The Himalayas in the state of Uttarakhand are especially rich in water resources. This area is home to dozens of perennial streams and numerous other rain-fed rivers along with innumerable rivulets, waterfalls and ponds, etc.

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies (grasslands) with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon from many miles afar. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar — except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trapdoor in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the ploughed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of long blades until they were the same gray colour to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.