Feathered Friend
NoteWhat This Chapter Covers
Unit 5: Science and Curiosity opens with a clever science-fiction story by Arthur C. Clarke, Feathered Friend. Aboard a space station, a crewman named Sven Olsen secretly brings up a little canary called Claribel. At first she is just a charming oddity, flying effortlessly in zero gravity. But one day Claribel suddenly faints — and the crew realises the air has turned bad: an air purifier has frozen and the costly alarm has failed. The bird’s collapse warns them in time to save their lives. It is the old idea of the “canary in a coal mine” carried into space. You will read the story, study its science and grammar, build vocabulary, and practise CBSE-style questions.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- retell the story and explain how Claribel saved the crew;
- explain the theme — small beings matter; technology can fail; respect nature;
- describe how weightlessness (zero gravity) affects the bird and the crew;
- use the chapter’s vocabulary of space and science correctly;
- use narrative past tenses, similes, and modals of deduction.