Glimpses of Class 10 Words and Expressions 2 PDF and Guide

Glimpses of Class 10 English Words and Expressions 2 is the NCERT workbook unit that goes with the Glimpses of India chapter in First Flight. The book prints it as Unit 5 – Glimpses of India; this site lists it as chapter 4.

The unit holds two reading passages — a Parsi food memoir of old Delhi and the story of Araku valley coffee — plus vocabulary, grammar, listening, speaking, writing and a project. The official NCERT PDF of the book is right below, and this page walks you through the unit section by section.

Download the official Words and Expressions 2 PDF

What is inside this unit at a glance

Open the unit and you meet its sections in a fixed order. Below is that order as the book prints it.

• LET’S BEGIN — a group warm-up on India’s diversity
• TEXT I — the Parsi community passage on old Delhi
• LOOK UP AND UNDERSTAND — the word list for TEXT I
• TEXT II — the Araku valley coffee passage
• IDIOM — butter someone up
• VOCABULARY — sound word pairs
• GRAMMAR — adjectives ending in ing and ed, then a past-tense rewrite
• EDITING — spelling corrections in The Valley of Flowers
• LISTENING — notes and a summary of the Goa baker passage
• FUN FACTS — adverse and averse
• SPEAKING — a budget trip to Araku and tongue twisters
• WRITING — a train journey, an advertisement, Kashmiri breads
• PROJECT — Indian Railways then and now

What this unit asks you to do

Before you begin, see the whole arc: the unit moves from reading, to the language rules the reading raises, to speaking and writing with those rules still in hand.

1. Work in groups of four. Pick any five Indian states and research their regional cuisine, dance and music, art forms, and anything else interesting. Mark the five places on a map and present your findings.
2. Read TEXT I, the Parsi memory passage, and answer its inference and comprehension questions.
3. Work through the LOOK UP AND UNDERSTAND list for the Parsi passage, then read TEXT II on Araku coffee and answer its questions.
4. Learn the idiom butter someone up, match the nine sound pairs, and do the grammar exercise on adjectives ending in ing and ed.
5. Rewrite the Coorg passage from First Flight in the past tense and check your answer with a partner.
6. Edit the misspelt words in the Valley of Flowers paragraph and read the corrected text aloud.
7. Listen to the Goa baker passage read aloud, note down keywords and main ideas, then summarise the paragraph from your notes.
8. Plan a budget trip to Araku valley in your group and prepare an itinerary; then try the tongue twisters.
9. Write a train journey account using the given expressions, an advertisement for your favourite tea or coffee, and a collage of breads from across India.
10. Close with the project: research Indian Railways and collect pictures of vintage, royal and luxury trains.

The unit states its own starting point: you have already met Coorg and Assam coffee and tea in First Flight‘s Glimpses of India chapter. This workbook unit extends that chapter into two new regions — Parsi Delhi and Andhra Pradesh.

The two passages: Parsi Delhi and Araku coffee

Both passages are press extracts, and both are comprehension passages first and cultural stories second. Read for the facts, then answer the questions with evidence from the text.

Passage one: Parsi food and memory in old Delhi

Nowrosji Kapadia’s booming voice could be heard across the Old Delhi railway platform. His favourite pastime was to greet the Frontier Mail, arriving from Mumbai on its way to Peshawar, and cajole Parsi visitors off the train — home for a meal, often overnight, while he talked up the advantages of shifting to Delhi.

His wife Jer Bai would occasionally object to unknown visitors, but she was always overruled.

The passage then turns to what the family ate and what the food meant. Two days before a festival, cooking began in every home; no one hired outside caterers, and the poorer members of the community never discovered who had quietly paid for their share. That shared, generous way of life, the writer says, has almost vanished.

The writer’s own memory carries the emotional weight: making malido, the Parsi style halwa, demands such strong biceps that her first attempt under her grandmother’s supervision left her arms aching for two days — and gave her a healthy respect for her dainty grandmother.

Teatime, too, was a ritual: dressing up for batasa, nankhatai, flaky khari, patrel, kumas and her favourite bhakra.

The questions the unit sets on this passage:

• Infer the meaning of cajole Parsi visitors off the train and outside catering was unheard of.
• Explain why Jer Bai’s arguments were always overruled.
• Say what kind of life has almost gone forever.
• Say what gave the writer a new respect for her grandmother.
• Say what made teatime special in the writer’s home.
• Tick the correct option: what is an exhausting exercise? (Cooking malido.)
• List the Parsi delicacies mentioned, and find the words for Mithu dahi in your own language.

Notice the link the unit builds: the idiom box defines butter someone up as impressing someone with flattery — exactly what Nowrosji does at the station.

Passage two: the making of Araku coffee

Araku valley sits about 1,200 m above sea level in the north-eastern corner of Andhra Pradesh, sharing a border with Odisha. Every January, the Araku Balloon Festival brings guests who float over a landscape that shifts from densely forested hills to terrace farms and occasional village clusters.

The drive to the coffee estates passes through the five northern mandals — Ananthagiri, Dumbriguda, Hukumpeta, Munchingi Puttu and Araku valley — and the name Araku was chosen for the coffee simply because it sounded poetic.

Coffee came to these hill tracts in 1898, introduced by British civil servant N.S. Brodie. The modern story begins as a livelihood initiative by the Naandi Foundation, and the passage charts its growth into a brand that works with 517 villages and 10,986 farmers — all of them estate owners and entrepreneurs with a stake in the business.

The quality comes from bio-dynamic farming: composting, shade trees such as mango and jackfruit, assessed terroirs, and careful procedures from “sapling to savouring”.

The questions the unit sets on this passage:

• Infer the meaning of traverses an unusual trajectory, far-flung coffee estates, densely forested hills and village clusters.
• Find words that mean hidden (tucked away), distant or remote (far-flung), to improve the quality or flavour (enriched) and a pleasant smell (aroma).
• Say what is unique about Araku valley in paragraph one.
• Underline and write down the sentences showing that Araku coffee has moved beyond being only a means of livelihood.
• Find more cultivation terms such as terrace farms and bio-dynamic farming, and give their meanings.

Side by side, the two passages answer the unit’s opening question about India’s diversity in two different ways:

The language skills this unit practises

After the two readings, the unit drills four reusable skills. Each one comes back in the paper, so learn the method, not just the answers.

Inferring meaning from context

The infer-the-meaning questions open both passages, and they are the easiest to miss if you translate word by word. The method below works every time.

1. Read the whole sentence that contains the phrase, not just the phrase alone.
2. Decide what job the word or phrase does: an action, a description, a thing, a place.
3. Look for the nearby clue — a synonym, an example, a contrast, or the situation the sentence describes.
4. Put your guess back into the sentence and read it aloud. If it still makes sense, the guess is right.

Worked example 1. “Nowrosji would cajole Parsi visitors off the train.” The lines around it show him persuading guests to come home for a meal and to stay overnight. So cajole means to persuade gently, often with flattery. The unit’s own idiom — butter someone up — carries the same idea.

Worked example 2. “The story of Araku Valley traverses an unusual trajectory.” The passage is about a journey from a small livelihood initiative to a globally appreciated product. So the phrase means it follows an unusual path: traverses = travels across or follows, and trajectory = the path something takes.

Sound words and their partners

This exercise asks you to match a sound with the thing that makes it. The rule is simple: the noun must be the thing that actually produces the sound.

If a pair sounds wrong when you picture it, it is wrong: rustling of feet and shuffling of leaves both fail the picture test, so they can never be the answer.

Adjectives ending in ing and ending in ed

These are present and past participles of verbs doing the work of adjectives. The whole rule fits into one question: does the word describe the cause or the feeling?

• The ed form describes how a person feels: she appeared delighted with the gift, the bored students became restless.
• The ing form describes what something causes: a welcoming cup of coffee, a pleasing performance, a frightening experience.

The unit directs you back to the First Flight lesson on these adjectives (the book points you to page 97); reread it before attempting the blanks. In the fill-in exercise, the participle must describe the noun it sits next to: the changes proposed, the examples quoted, the infected area, the things taken.

Watch one trap: the instruction asks for past participles, yet the sentence about Cyclone Fani needs the ing form — a frightening experience — because the storm is the thing that causes the fear.

Rewriting a passage in the past tense

This task gives you the Coorg description from First Flight and asks you to move every tensed verb into the past. The rule: only tensed verbs change; participles and forms ending in ing stay exactly where they are.

• “Birds, bees, and butterflies are there” → “were there” — the helper verb changes.
• “I do, however, prefer to step aside” → “I did, however, prefer to step aside” — after did, the main verb stays in its base form.
• “The climb … brings you into a panoramic view” → “brought you” — an irregular past you must recall, not guess.
• “A walk … leads to … Nisargadhama” → “led to”.
• “Running into Buddhist monks … is a bonus” → “was a bonus” — the word running is a participle, so it does not change. Words like running and searching stay as they are.

The irregular pasts in this passage — bring→brought, lead→led, keep→kept — have to be remembered; no rule builds them. Do the rewrite with a pencil first, then read the whole passage aloud in the past before checking with your partner.

Words the unit asks you to look up and understand

The unit prints two word boxes, one for each passage, plus an idiom and a fun-facts pair. The table below gives each word a plain meaning and a quick way to remember it.

The fun-facts box gives a built-in memory trick: adverse shares its root with adversity (difficult, working against you), while averse shares its root with aversion (a strong feeling against something).

The figures in this unit and what they ask you to do

The unit uses its illustrations as activity prompts, not decoration. Each one below tells you what to do with the skill printed beside it; the captions are the book’s own.

The idiom card defines butter someone up as impressing someone with flattery. It sits just before the vocabulary exercises, and it explains TEXT I in one phrase: Nowrosji welcomes, praises and feeds his guests — he butters them up — to persuade them to stay.

You can use the idiom the same way: praising someone to get what you want is buttering them up.

The nature scene carries the sentence that opens the past-tense rewrite: Birds, bees, and butterflies are there to give you company. It is the first change you make in that exercise — are there becomes were there — and the image helps you hold the whole scene in mind while you move every tensed verb to the past.

The listening card states the purpose of the listening task: you do not write everything down, you compress. A classmate or teacher reads the Goa baker passage from First Flight aloud; you note keywords, main ideas and striking expressions while listening, then summarise the paragraph in your own words.

The writing card lists the four things a full account of the train journey must contain: the distance, how the tickets were booked, the facilities on the journey, and suggestions for improvement.

The unit also asks you to build the account around five expressions from the Parsi passage — length and breadth, chugged into, vouch for, long gone, out came the treats — so your paragraph should use all five naturally.

Mistakes students make in this unit and how to avoid them

Most errors in this unit come from picking words that almost fit. The table names each characteristic mistake before you make it.

How this unit connects to the English paper

Words and Expressions 2 is a workbook, so the unit itself is not an exam paper. What it does is train the skills the CBSE Class 10 English paper assesses, and that is the honest way to read it.

• Reading: the infer-the-meaning questions on both passages are the same operation as the inference questions in the reading section.
• Grammar: the adjective rule, the past-tense rewrite and the spelling editing are the same operations tested in the grammar section.
• Writing: the train journey account and the tea or coffee advertisement are descriptive writing practice of the kind set in the writing section.

One important caveat: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical. Check the current official CBSE syllabus before you decide what to revise, and use the Class 10 English notes to practise the skills rather than to guess the paper.

Unit 5 in one read

The whole unit, in the order you work through it:

1. LET’S BEGIN — research any five Indian states and mark them on a map.
2. TEXT I — the Parsi food and memory passage on old Delhi.
3. TEXT II — the Araku valley coffee passage.
4. IDIOM — butter someone up.
5. VOCABULARY — the nine sound word pairs.
6. GRAMMAR — adjectives ending in ing and ed, then the Coorg passage rewritten in the past tense.
7. EDITING — spelling corrections in the Valley of Flowers paragraph.
8. LISTENING — notes and a summary of the Goa baker passage.
9. FUN FACTS — adverse vs averse.
10. SPEAKING — a budget trip itinerary for Araku, plus tongue twisters.
11. WRITING — the train journey account, the tea/coffee advertisement, the Kashmiri breads collage.
12. PROJECT — Indian Railways past and present, and vintage, royal and luxury trains.

The thread that holds it together: the unit carries forward First Flight‘s Glimpses of India promise — India’s diversity shows up in food, in work and in community life.

Related resources

This listing is maintained for the 2026-27 academic session using the NCERT textbook information available to us. NCERT remains the authority for confirming the latest edition.

For the workbook’s other units and practice material, see the Class 10 English notes hub. The Class 10 study resources page links every subject book, and the main CBSE notes index covers all classes.

If you are revising the companion reading, the Glimpses of India chapter notes cover Coorg, Assam tea and the Goa baker, while the earlier workbook unit beside Two Stories about Flying follows the same pattern.

Sources and data verification

• This page describes the NCERT Class 10 English textbook Words and Expressions 2, official edition available on ncert.nic.in. The unit is printed in the book as Unit 5 – Glimpses of India and is listed on this site as chapter 4.
• What this page covers and what it does not: it is a guide to Unit 5’s passages and tasks, not a replacement for the official PDF.
• This listing is maintained for the current academic session using the NCERT information available to us.
• Who settles what: NCERT settles textbooks, editions and PDFs; CBSE settles the curriculum, syllabus and examinations. No expert review process beyond that is claimed.

Reference: NCERT Class 10 English Words and Expressions 2 textbook, chapter 4 (the book’s Unit 5 – Glimpses of India), official edition on ncert.nic.in.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Glimpses of India unit in Words and Expressions 2 Class 10 about?

It is the workbook companion to the Glimpses of India chapter in First Flight, printed in the book as Unit 5. It contains two reading passages — a Parsi food memoir of old Delhi and the story of Araku valley coffee — followed by vocabulary, grammar, editing, listening, speaking, writing and project tasks built around them.

What exactly is Araku coffee and why is it in this unit?

Araku coffee is a brand grown in the Araku valley in the north-eastern corner of Andhra Pradesh, about 1,200 m above sea level. Coffee arrived there in 1898, introduced by British civil servant N.S. Brodie. Today the brand works with 517 villages and 10,986 farmers, and its quality comes from bio-dynamic farming with composting, shade trees and assessed terroirs.

It is in the unit as a second Glimpses story — this one about work, enterprise and a livelihood initiative by the Naandi Foundation.

What is the difference between adjectives ending in ing and adjectives ending in ed in this unit?

The ing form describes what something causes (a welcoming cup of coffee, a pleasing performance); the ed form describes how a person feels (she appeared delighted, the bored students). One trap in the exercise: Cyclone Fani was a frightening experience — the storm causes the fear, so the ing form is needed even though the instruction says past participle.

Which words does the unit ask students to look up and understand?

TEXT I: cajole, dainty, extensive, overruled, vouch. TEXT II: bio-dynamic, entrepreneurs, intrinsically, mandals, terroirs, trajectory, traverses, tucked. The Fun Facts box adds adverse and averse, and the idiom box adds butter someone up.

Does the Glimpses of Class 10 unit come in the CBSE English board exam?

The unit is a workbook, not an exam paper, so no passage from it is promised in the exam. But the skills it drills — reading comprehension, inference, vocabulary, participle use, tense control, spelling and descriptive writing — are the skills the English paper assesses. Textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical, so check the current official CBSE syllabus.

How do I download the official Words and Expressions 2 PDF?

Open the official NCERT textbooks portal at ncert.nic.in/textbook.php, select Class X, choose English, and download Words and Expressions 2. It is a whole-book file; turn to Unit 5 – Glimpses of India.