Class 7 English Chapter 7: My Brother’s Great Invention

A shout from the doorstep

The story opens in the middle of a disaster. Somebody roars from the front step, wanting to know who put a water bag there, and a girl whispers to her brother that it is his burglar alarm. He is already leaving the house.

Who is telling us this

Anita, fourteen. Her brother Anand is a year younger. She stops the story to introduce herself, which is a thing a first-person narrator can do and a storyteller outside the story cannot.

What that does to the reading

Everything we learn about Anand comes through somebody who finds him exhausting. Her verdict is that he merely believes himself to be a scientist. That is a judgement rather than a fact, and a careful reader keeps the difference in view.

The reason for an alarm

There had been a run of thefts in the colony. So the idea was not silly. The moment both parents were out, Anand began, and his sister was pulled in although she would rather have finished her novel.

Her one condition

If you get a shelling, she tells him, do not bring me into it. She says something like it twice. A reader should file that away, because it tells us what she expects to happen.

The blueprint

Anand produces an elaborate drawing of bells, wire and doorways, and the word blueprint, which Anita says makes him feel professional. The drawing shows three stages: a bell, a falling water bag, then a telephone call.

The question nobody else asked

How is the thing supposed to recognise a burglar? Anita asks it plainly. The answer is loftily given and amounts to nothing, and she keeps her doubts to herself because nothing stops her brother in this mood.

The answer, when it comes

The alarm fires only when the door is opened gently, because a thief tries the handle stealthily. That is the whole detector: gentleness in, alarm out.

Why the design could not work

Because gentleness is not guilt. Plenty of people open a door softly, and one of them lives in the house. The alarm was not badly built; it was built to test the wrong thing, and no better wiring would have helped.

So it catches the one man it must not

Papa always opens the door softly. He is soaked, he is as angry as angry could be, and he is quite sure which boy rigged it up. Anand vanishes until after dinner.

What his sister does next

Nothing. She has the one observation that would have stopped the project and she lets it go, because she knows what happens when her brother is in this mood. So the reader watches the disaster approach with her, which is a kind of suspense a story told from outside could not manage.

The soaking, and what it buys

Papa is sopping wet and wants to know who is behind the nonsense. Ma arrives and offers the word soothingly. Anand, who left the house before the door opened, comes back after dinner, when the shouting is over.

A week of quiet, then a film

For a week Anand attempts nothing. Then the household sees Back to the Future, and that, Anita says, was the end of peace and quiet. Her brother decides to build a time machine.

How a family prepares

Papa locks the tool box and hides the key. Ma keeps a wary eye on the oven and the mixer. Both of them know what an inventing binge costs, because Anand takes the house apart for parts.

A fortnight of hammering

The room next door becomes a network of bulbs, levers, springs and wire, with an enormous panel for a control switchboard. Nobody is allowed in. Anand stops combing his hair whenever Ma is not looking.

Two different refusals

At lunch Anand announces a trial for that night. Papa says no, and means it. Ma sees the crestfallen look and asks to be allowed a look at the thing. The same event, two ways of handling a disappointed child.

The promise, given half-heartedly

The parents leave for a wedding in Kharagpur, a few hours from Calcutta. Ma makes Anand promise to leave the machine alone until they return. The story says he promised half-heartedly, and offended at the lack of respect.

What the first half has set up

A boy who will not be stopped, a machine nobody has tested, an empty house for one night, and a run of thefts in the colony. Every piece of the second half is already on the table.

Scenario:

Three pupils build a detector for a science fair. The task is to tell a ripe mango from an unripe one without cutting it. Ananya builds a device that sounds a buzzer when the fruit is soft, and it buzzes for every ripe mango and also for every bruised unripe one. Bilal builds one that measures colour, and it passes a green variety that is ripe and fails a yellow one that is not. Chhaya spends her first week weighing, smelling and squeezing forty mangoes. She finds that softness and smell together are right nine times in ten. Either sign on its own is right only six times in ten. Her device is the ugliest of the three and it wins.

Analysis:

Ananya and Bilal both built working devices that answered the wrong question. A soft mango is not a ripe mango, and a yellow mango is not a ripe mango, so each detector tested something that merely tends to go with ripeness. That is precisely Anand’s mistake with the alarm. His device reliably detected a door being opened gently, and gentleness merely tends to go with burglary; it also goes with fathers, neighbours and anybody carrying shopping. Chhaya’s week of weighing and squeezing is the step the other two skipped, and it is not a building step at all. She was testing whether her test worked before she built anything on top of it. The ugly device wins because the question behind it had been checked, and no quality of construction can rescue a detector that is looking for the wrong thing.

Activity:

Pick something you would like to detect, such as whether somebody has been in your room. Write down the sign your device would test for, then list three innocent people or events that would set it off. If your list is easy to write, the test is the wrong one.

Title:

Build the chain, then test the alarm

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Every gap can be filled, which is what makes the first half a chain rather than a list of mishaps. And the list on the back is longer than one name, which is the whole reason the alarm was doomed: the test it used picks out a group that contains burglars and also contains the man who pays for the house.

A real burglar alarm uses a sensor that no householder trips: a magnetic contact that opens when the door moves at all, with a keypad to disarm it. The problem Anand ran into is the one every alarm designer has to solve.

Anand likes the word blueprint, and Anita tells us it makes him feel professional. Real blueprints were blue because of an early copying process that produced white lines on a blue background.

The story is set in Calcutta, now Kolkata, and the parents travel to Kharagpur for a wedding. The book gives both names for the city, which is why the text reads a little oddly at that point.

Why the alarm had to fail — Gentle is not the same as guilty — The detector tested for gentleness. Burglars are gentle with doors, and so are fathers coming home, so the test cannot tell them apart. That is a fault in the idea rather than in the building.

Writing about a character — Trait, then quotation, every time — Name the trait and then produce the line that shows it. A trait with no evidence is an opinion, and a quotation with no trait is just copying.

One night, two children

The parents leave by an afternoon train and will be back the following evening. Anand falls asleep at once. Anita stays up to finish her novel, which happens to be a murder story.

Three sounds, in order

At about half past eleven there is a scratching at the front door. She tells herself it is her imagination. A little later comes a rattle, and then a click. Each sound is nearer to being real than the one before.

Why that order matters

The story could have said that a thief broke in. Instead it gives the noises one at a time, in the order the children heard them, so the reader is put exactly where they are: able to hear and unable to see.

Her brother is no help at first

She shakes him and whispers that somebody is at the door. Then open it, he says, still half asleep. The reply is useless and it is also exact: a boy who has not yet understood that anything is wrong. It takes a second attempt before he sits up and asks who and what.

The door swings open

A rough-looking man with a green scarf round his neck. Anand gasps. Anita recognises him at once: it is Boppa, who has recently begun sweeping out the compounds along their row of houses.

And no wonder

That one line explains everything. A man who sweeps the compounds can see who is at home and who is not. The thefts in the colony were never luck. They were information.

The threat

A single squeak, he says, and they will find out what happens, and the cudgel is waved while he says it. Then he backs out, and the children hear the latch slide shut. They are locked in their own room.

The question, and the lie

The door opens again. Where is your father’s room? Anita is about to point upstairs when Anand answers quickly: the one next to this one. That is his own room, with the time machine in it.

Was that reckless or clever?

His sister says it was reckless, in the plainest words available. He will come back as mad as mad can be. Anand’s answer is practical: it buys us time, and he will take a while to find the light switch.

What they hear next

A crash, then a loud scream. Then a low humming, some muffled thumps and an eerie whine. Anand knows the last of these. My time machine, he says. He has started it.

One more howl, then shouting

There is a second howl, fainter than the first, and a great deal of clattering. Fainter is the word to notice, since something is either moving away or stopping. The children shout for all they are worth, and in a few minutes there are footsteps on the drive: the Sharmas and Dr Mohan.

What the rescuers find

The door is unlocked. The machine is still humming softly, and there is no other sound in the room. Boppa is not there. Dr Mohan looks behind the door and asks whether the children imagined it.

Anita’s answer to that

How, she asks, could two people have imagined one man? It is a fair point, and it is the first of the story’s arguments rather than its facts. Both children were awake and both saw the man.

The four facts

The machine was humming. The green scarf lay by the panel of switches. There is only one way out of the house, and the rescuers came in by it. And Boppa was nowhere in the house, upstairs or down.

What those facts do not settle

They do not say where he went. Anand says the machine worked and the man went into the past. Mrs Sharma supposes he slipped out unseen. Mr Sharma smiles and says what an imagination this boy has.

The grown-ups and the boy

Nobody is being stupid. Each verdict fits the four facts, and the one that fits most easily is also the dullest. The story declines to choose, and the choosing is handed to the reader.

Papa’s two reasons

The machine is dismantled because Papa thinks it is not safe. Anita adds, in brackets, that he may also have had a niggling suspicion that it worked. One sentence, two reasons, and the second is the better joke.

The last line

Boppa is never seen again. And Anand, convinced he is a genius, has started a new project: a telephone for contacting creatures in outer space. Nothing has been learnt, which is the point.

Scenario:

A pencil case goes missing from a classroom during games. Four things are known. The case is not in the room. A window that is usually shut is open about a hand’s width. Rohit, who hates games, was in the room for ten minutes. And the case was seen on the desk after the bell. The class decides Rohit took it. Their teacher writes the four facts on the board and asks what each one rules out. The open window does not rule out Rohit, and Rohit being in the room does not rule out the window. She then asks the class to name every account that fits all four facts, and they manage three before the period ends.

Analysis:

The class had reached a verdict from a list of facts without once asking what each fact excluded. That is the ordinary way of going wrong, and the teacher’s question is the repair. Rohit being in the room is consistent with his taking the case and equally consistent with his reading a book while somebody else reached through the window. The open window is consistent with a thief and also with a hot afternoon. None of the four facts picks out one account, because each of them is shared by several. This is the position the rescuers are in at the end of the story. They have a humming machine, a dropped scarf, one exit and no intruder, and the honest statement is that Boppa was never seen again. Anand wants the time machine, the Sharmas want the unseen escape, and the facts do not decide between them. Naming the accounts that fit, rather than choosing one early, is what the teacher was teaching.

Activity:

Take something that went missing at home or in school. Write down every fact you are sure of, then beside each one write what it rules out. Count how many facts rule out nothing at all.

Title:

Sort the evidence, then argue the case

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Every explanation fits all four facts, which is why the argument cannot be won from the evidence in the story. The sentence at the end is the useful part: naming the one missing fact that would decide the matter is a sharper piece of thinking than choosing a side, and it is also how a detective story is built.

A cudgel is a short heavy stick carried as a weapon. The word is old, and the story uses it rather than stick because it tells you at once what the object is for.

Anita notices that she was reading a murder story when the scratching began. The detail is doing work: it explains why she was awake and why she was so ready to be frightened.

Mr Sharma offers to spend the night in the house. It is the sort of thing a neighbour did and does, and it is the only comfort the story offers before it stops.

The order of the night — Scratch, rattle, click, then the door swings — Three sounds before anything is seen. Learning them in order gives you the first half of the ordering exercise without any further effort.

Reading an unresolved ending — List the facts, then list the stories that fit — Four facts, and at least two stories consistent with them. Working out which facts are shared is more useful than deciding what happened.

A story full of noises

This chapter is a noisy one. There is a clanging alarm, a crash, a scream, muffled thumps, an eerie whine, a low humming, and a fortnight of hammering, sawing and clattering. Several of those words are doing a special job.

What onomatopoeia is

The use of a word that imitates the sound of the thing it names. Boom for a firework, ding-dong for a bell, pitter-patter for rain, tick-tock for a clock. Saying the word makes a small version of the noise.

The test for it

Say it aloud and listen. Clang, hiss, thump and crash all pass. Noise, sound and racket do not, because they name a sound without imitating one. The test takes a second and it is reliable.

Why a writer bothers

Because the imitation carries information. A crash tells you the noise was sudden and something broke. A humming tells you it was low and continuous. A reader who is told only that there was a noise learns neither thing.

Three in a row

Hammering and sawing and clattering, says the story, of a fortnight of building. Three onomatopoeic words together give the noise a texture, and they also give the sentence the rhythm of the work itself.

One word that carries a manner

Anita hisses to her brother. Hissed tells you the volume was low, the urgency was high, and the remark was not meant to be overheard. A plain said would have given you none of that.

Now a different kind of fixed phrase

The story says that the film ended the peace and quiet of that household. Peace and quiet is a pair of words that travel together, always in that order. Such a pair is called a binomial.

What makes a binomial

Two words, linked by "and" or "or", used together so often that their order has set. Safe and sound. Odds and ends. Make or break. Pros and cons. Now or never. Give and take.

The order is habit, not logic

Sound and safe means exactly what safe and sound means, and it is wrong. Ends and odds is not English. Nothing about the meaning fixes the order; use has fixed it, and so the pair has to be learnt as though it were one long word.

Two kinds of pair

Some make a single idea out of two words. Odds and ends is a collection of small leftover things, and peace and quiet is one state rather than two. Others set two things against each other: pros and cons, give and take.

Using them in a sentence

A journey ends safe and sound. A drawer holds odds and ends. A last chance is now or never. A decision that will decide everything is make or break. A friendship needs give and take. Each fits one kind of situation.

And now the third kind

And this is not the first time he has got on Papa’s nerves, says Anita, or frightened somebody half to death. Those phrases mean something quite different from the words inside them. They are idioms.

What an idiom is

A phrase whose meaning is not the sum of its words. It is raining cats and dogs has no animals in it. The whole expression has one agreed meaning, and the parts have stopped contributing.

The story’s own idioms

To get a shelling is to be scolded severely. To fall over oneself is to try very hard, usually in a rush. To leave the coast clear is to make a place free of anybody who would interfere.

Why an idiom cannot be translated word by word

Because the words are no longer carrying the meaning. Put raining cats and dogs into another language one word at a time and a reader learns about animals, not about weather.

A quick way to tell which is which

Ask one question: can a stranger work it out? A sound word can be guessed at, because the noise is in the word. A pair can be checked against what you have heard. An idiom gives a stranger nothing at all, which is why it is the one that stops a reader dead.

What all three have in common

Each is fixed. The onomatopoeic word is fixed to its sound, the binomial to its order, the idiom to its meaning. None of them can be assembled from the parts, so all three have to be met whole.

Which is a familiar conclusion

A great deal of English is like this. It is a matter of what speakers happen to do rather than what a rule requires, and reading is how it arrives. The three blocks in this chapter are three instances of one fact.

Scenario:

A school magazine asks three pupils to write up a cricket match for a partner school abroad. Devika writes that the bowling was fast and the fielding sharp. Eshan writes that the captain was over the moon and that the openers fell over themselves to reach the pitch. Farah writes the same events but checks each phrase by asking whether a reader who had never heard it could work it out. She keeps the score, cuts over the moon for delighted, and keeps fell over themselves because she adds the word hurrying beside it. The partner school replies with questions about Eshan’s report and none about the other two.

Analysis:

Eshan wrote good English and it did not travel. Over the moon has nothing to do with the moon, and fall over oneself has nothing to do with falling, so a reader meeting either for the first time has no way in. That is the defining property of an idiom: the parts have stopped carrying the meaning, so the phrase has to be known rather than parsed. Devika avoided the problem by using no idioms at all, which is safe and a little flat. Farah did the interesting thing. She did not ban idioms; she applied a test, asking of each phrase whether a stranger could reconstruct it, and then either replaced it or supplied enough context to carry it. That is the right habit, because the same test tells you when an idiom is working hard for you and when it is merely familiar to you.

Activity:

Find three idioms in anything you are reading. For each one, write what it means, then write the sentence again without it. Decide which of the two sentences you would send to somebody learning English, and why.

Title:

Hunt the three kinds

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

The last instruction is the hard one, and it is the point of the exercise: if you cannot give the meaning of an idiom without reusing its own words, you have not got the meaning yet. The reversal test is the quickest of the three, and almost every pair fails it, which is what tells you the order is fixed by habit.

Different languages imitate the same sound differently. A dog says bow-wow in English and something else in almost every other language, which shows that an onomatopoeic word is still a word and not a recording.

Some binomials are hundreds of years old and keep words that have dropped out of ordinary use. Odds, in odds and ends, no longer means anything by itself in that sense.

An idiom is almost impossible to translate word by word. Translate raining cats and dogs into another language literally and the reader learns about animals rather than weather.

Spotting onomatopoeia — Say it aloud and listen for the thing — If saying the word makes a small version of the noise, it is onomatopoeic. Clang, hiss and thump pass the test; noise, sound and racket do not.

Binomials — The order is habit, not logic — Safe and sound means the same backwards and is wrong backwards. That is the whole point: the pair has to be learnt in its order, like a single long word.

Two things happened, and one came first

Anand had vanished by this time, says the story, and came back only after dinner, once Papa had cooled down. Three actions in one sentence, and the tenses are doing the sorting.

The rule, in one line

The later action goes in the simple past. The earlier one takes had. That is the whole of it, and the rest is practice at deciding which came first.

Looking at the story’s own sentence

Papa cooled down first, then Anand reappeared. So cooled takes had and reappeared does not. The vanishing came earliest of all, which is why it too is had vanished.

Why the word order does not help

Sahil had locked the gate before he walked to the bus stop. He left for the airport after he had packed his suitcase. Same two actions, same two tenses, and the had has not moved, although the sentence has been turned round.

So the joiners decide nothing

Before, after, by the time, when. Each tells you how the two actions are related and none of them decides which gets had. Work out the order of events first, and only then write the sentence.

Two worked examples

We started work, and he arrived in the morning. Which came first? The starting. So: we had started work before he arrived, or he arrived after we had started work. Both are correct, and both put had on the starting. Now a second. The villagers left the village, and the flood submerged the area. The leaving came first, which is fortunate for the villagers. By the time the flood submerged the area, the villagers had left.

A third example, from the exercises

The hall fell silent, and the band walked on. The walking on was first, so it takes had. The hall fell silent once the band had walked on to the stage. Reading the sentence back and checking where the had sits is the whole of the method.

Now a different small word

The story also uses a handful of phrasal verbs, where a verb joins a particle and the pair means something of its own. Five of them are worth learning from this chapter.

The five

An alarm is tripped off, meaning set going. Rain lets up, meaning it eases. An event turns out well, meaning it ends that way. A family runs out of time, meaning none is left. And a gadget is rigged up, meaning put together temporarily.

None of them can be assembled

Tripped off is the clearest case. Trip on its own suggests catching your foot, and off suggests away, and an alarm that has been tripped off has been switched on. The meaning has gone somewhere neither word points.

Which is the familiar conclusion again

Phrasal verbs are usage rather than rule. A dictionary lists each combination separately for exactly that reason, and the only way to acquire them is to meet them.

A note on where they come from

Several of the five come straight out of the story. The alarm is tripped off, the gadget is rigged up, and the family runs out of time on the night of the wedding. Learning them from a text you already know is easier than learning them from a list.

And now the spelling

As usual, says Anita, I had to be involved, though I would have preferred to finish my novel. And later: we are old enough to look after ourselves. Those two -ough words do not rhyme with each other.

Though and enough

Though rhymes with low. Enough rhymes with puff. The four letters are identical, and the sounds have nothing in common, which means the spelling is not telling a reader how to say the word.

Five groups, and a sixth

Through sounds like oo. Cough sounds like off. Dough and though sound like o. Bough and plough sound like ow. Thought sounds like aw. And rough, tough and enough rhyme with puff.

Why English does this

The spelling records history. These words once had a rough consonant at the end which English later lost, and the letters stayed on the page while the pronunciations drifted apart from one another.

What follows for a reader

That you cannot sound out an -ough word you have never met. The letters give you no reliable instruction, so the word has to be heard once and remembered, like a binomial or an idiom.

The one sentence that holds them all

The chapter supplies a tongue twister made of nothing but -ough words: a boy with tough dough on a rose bough who falls in a trough and catches a cough. Say it slowly first, then quickly.

Scenario:

Two pupils give different accounts of a broken window. Gita says she arrived, found the window broken, and then saw Harsh in the corridor. Harsh says he reached the corridor, heard the glass, and then Gita arrived. Their teacher asks each of them to write the account out using had for everything that had already happened when they arrived. Gita writes that the window had already been broken when she arrived. Harsh writes that he had reached the corridor before the glass broke. The two sentences no longer contradict each other, and the teacher points out that the dispute was never about the facts at all.

Analysis:

Both accounts were true and they sounded incompatible, because both pupils had told their stories in the simple past throughout. A string of simple past verbs puts everything on one level, so a listener has to guess the order, and each pupil guessed in their own favour. Asking for had changed that. The past perfect marks what was already done, so Gita’s sentence says the breaking was over before her arrival, and Harsh’s says his arrival was over before the breaking. Those two statements fit together perfectly: he was there first, the glass went, and she came in afterwards. One small word per clause turned two rival accounts into one timeline. That is the whole use of the tense, and it is why the past perfect is worth more than its reputation as a formal flourish.

Activity:

Write four things you did yesterday in the simple past, in a jumbled order, and give them to a partner. Then rewrite them using had for everything that was already done by the time of the next event, and ask the partner whether the order is now clear.

Title:

Sort the -ough words, then build a sentence

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Disagreements cluster in two columns, because trough and bough are the two most people have read more often than they have heard. That is the whole lesson in miniature: a word you have only seen cannot be pronounced from its spelling when the spelling is -ough, so the ones you get wrong are exactly the ones nobody has said to you.

The -ough spellings date from a time when the letters did record a sound, a rough consonant that English later lost. The spellings stayed put while the pronunciations drifted apart.

The past perfect is sometimes called the pluperfect, from a Latin phrase meaning more than perfect. It does exactly one job: it puts one past action behind another.

Ran out of has two particles rather than one, as put up with does. English allows a verb to collect more than one small word and still behave as a single unit.

Which past action takes had — The earlier one gets had — Work out which thing happened first, and put had in front of that one. The joining word makes no difference at all to the answer.

The -ough groups — Through, cough, dough, plough, thought, enough — Six words, six different sounds, one spelling. Learning the six as a set is easier than meeting them separately, because the contrast is what makes each memorable.