Unit- 10
A DREAM OF
FLIGHT
K.S. Raman
Comprehension:
C1.
Get into pairs/groups and discuss the answers to the following questions:
1) Which book took the author into “a dream of
flight?”
Ans: “The Invention
of the Aeroplane 1799-1909” written by Charles H. Gibbs Smith was the book took
the author into a dream of flight.
2) When did the author find the book?
Ans: The author found the book in two days.
3) What did the book explain?
Ans: The author
became curios when he read title, the book explained in great detail man’s
eternal longing and hope that led to innumerable trials, most of which ended as
disasters and subsequent experimentation arising from various inventions used
for flight before the advent of “Aeroplane”. The author found the book was so
absorbing that he even forgot about his regular evening walk.
4) How was the bird man dressed to fly?
Ans: The bird man
stood on atop a soaring tower with bat –like wings made from wood and cloth,
covered with birds’ feathers.
5) What happened to the bird man when he jumped from
the tower?
Ans: The bird man
flexes his shoulders and beating his arms fast, suddenly jumped out. Instead of
flying free in the sky like a bird, the man tumbled down inverted and totally
out of control and he fell on the ground and lost his life.
6) Who were the first aerial passengers?
Ans: A sheep, a hen
and a duck place in the basket of the balloon and became the first air
passengers.
C2.
Working in pairs, discuss the answers to the following questions and write them
in your notebook:
1) Describe the balloon in which the first aerial
passengers flew.
Ans: Hundreds of
people were gathered in the Market Square in the town of Annonay in France.
Flames leapt high from a huge pile of burning wood in the middle of the square.
Held by thick ropes all around on top of the fire was a mammoth globular fabric
envelope with its bottom opened. The sphere was filled with hot air and pulled
from side to side, four persons cut off the ropes. The spherical balloon
started flying upwards and drifted across the sky. They kept a sheep, a hen and
a duck in the basket of the balloon and those animals became the first air
passengers and the crowd watched open mouthed.
2) How did Otto Lilienthal make an attempt to fly?
Ans: Otto Lilienthal
lifted a strange craft built from wood and fabric and brought it out of a shed
built atop a big hill. That contained two 6 m long bat-like wings on top of one
another with a horizontal and a vertical surface behind, that craft had a ring
shaped frame between the wings. He stepped inside the frame and with his arms
supporting the ring, ran forward. After running a few steps, his craft started
floating in the air. Lilienthal glided hanging beneath for a long distance and
touched down at the bottom of the hill.
3) How has the author described Orville Wright’s
flight into the air?
Ans: On huge mounds
of sand abound all rounds in Kitty Hawk dunes in North Carolina, a two-winged
machine stood on a long wooden rafter. Orville Wright lied prone in the middle
over the bottom wing. A small internal combustion engine by his side turned a
pair of two-bladed paddle wheels through long bicycle chains. As the engine
growled, Wilbur Wright freed the rope holding the machine and it surged
forward. It moved about 12 meters per second, the machine suddenly lifted up
and beheld, it was flying in the air.
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