Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
When India’s first satellite went up in 1975, it was named Aryabhata, and the choice is usually explained with a list: the value of pi, the turning Earth, the eclipses. Lists of firsts flatter a nation. They also miss what is most unusual about the man. What he left behind is less a set of answers than a habit of asking how the sky actually works.
Take the stars. Anyone who watches them for an hour sees them wheel from east to west, and the obvious reading, for most of history, was that the heavens turn around a still Earth. Aryabhata, working near Kusumapura, close to old Pataliputra, proposed the reverse. The Earth spins on its axis, he said, and the stars only seem to move, much as the bank of a river seems to slip backwards to someone in a moving boat. It was a heterodox claim. The ground under our feet gives no hint of motion, and many astronomers after him would not accept it.
His account of eclipses has the same flavour. The popular story blamed Rahu and Ketu, who were said to swallow the Sun and the Moon. Aryabhata put it down to shadows: the Earth’s shadow falling on the Moon, or the Moon blocking the Sun. A shadow can be predicted. A demon cannot.
Even his best-known number carries a quiet lesson. His rule for the circle gives pi as 3.1416, and he calls the result approximate. It is a small word, and a conspicuously honest one, from a writer who was, by his own account, twenty-three in 499 CE, the year usually given for the Aryabhatiya, an age at which most of us are still copying other people’s figures into notebooks.
According to the passage, how did Aryabhata explain the nightly movement of the stars from east to west?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → The Earth itself turns, so its watchers are like boat passengers who see the bank moving.
The second paragraph gives Aryabhata’s explanation in plain words.
- He said “the Earth spins on its axis” and the stars “only seem to move”.
- He compared this to a river bank that seems to slip backwards to someone in a moving boat. The bank stays still, and the boat moves. In the same way, the stars stay still, and the Earth turns.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: The heavens are carried once a day around an Earth that stays perfectly still. — Incorrect. Contradicted: This is the “obvious reading” that Aryabhata turned around. He said the Earth moves, not the heavens.
Option 3: The shadow of the Earth hides different stars from view at different hours. — Incorrect. Wrong link: The passage uses the Earth’s shadow to explain eclipses of the Moon, not the motion of the stars.
Option 4: The Sun, as it moves each day, drags the stars along behind it across the sky. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage gives the Sun no part in the motion of the stars.