Class 6 Science Chapter 11: Nature's Treasures

A Village Where the Forest Begins

Bhoomi and Surya spend a vacation with their Ajji, whose village stands where the Western Ghats forest begins. The first thing they notice is the air. It is cooler than the air of the city, and it smells clean. Ajji tells them the place is full of treasures, and the air is one of them.

An Exercise to Start With

One morning Ajji is doing breathing exercises, and the children join her. Deep breath in, slow breath out, then a deeper one. Ajji says it fills the lungs with fresh air and keeps a person healthy. Then comes the part worth trying yourself: hold the breath as long as you comfortably can, and count.

What Holding It Tells You

Nobody manages it for long. Discomfort arrives quickly, and there is a reason. The air drawn in carries oxygen, and the body needs oxygen to carry out its work. Hold the breath and that supply is cut off, so the body is left short. Most other living beings are in the same position.

A Comparison Worth Remembering

Think about how long a person could manage without food. A few days, uncomfortable but survivable. Without water, fewer days than that. Without oxygen, a few minutes is all. The three needs are not equally urgent, and air is the one that cannot wait.

Something You Never See

Air is invisible, so it is noticed only through what it does. Leaves rustle on a tree. Clothes on a line sway. Switch on a fan and the pages of an open book start to flutter. Every one of those is air announcing itself without being seen at all.

Air on the Move Has a Name

Moving air is called wind. Sometimes it comes gently, and that is a breeze. Sometimes it comes hard, as in a storm. Same air, different speed, and the difference is easy to feel even though there is nothing to look at.

Not One Gas But Several

The air wrapped around the Earth is a mixture. Nitrogen is in it, and oxygen, and argon, and carbon dioxide, with a few more present only as traces. The name air covers them all together, which is why no single gas can be pointed to and called air.

Counting It in Hundreds

The proportions are set out on a grid of a hundred squares. Nitrogen takes 78 of them. Oxygen takes 21. That leaves exactly one square for argon, carbon dioxide and everything else put together. Seeing it drawn makes the balance obvious in a way a list of figures does not.

What Percentage Means

Percentage is the number of parts in every hundred, and the sign for it is %. So 21% oxygen means 21 parts out of a hundred, or 21 of those squares. The word is worth learning properly here, because it turns up constantly later.

The Surprise in Those Figures

Most people guess that air is mainly oxygen, since oxygen is the part we cannot do without. It is not. More than three quarters of air is nitrogen, and the gas that keeps us alive is only about a fifth of the whole.

Making a Firki

You need paper cut square at 15 cm on every side, scissors, one all-pin and a soft stick. Cut and fold it as the steps show, then pin it to the stick so it can spin freely. It takes a few minutes and it can be decorated however you like.

Making It Spin

Hold the firki and run, and it turns. Stand still and blow on it, and it turns. Move it a little back and forth and it turns again. In every case something is pushing the blades round, and that something is moving air, which is to say wind.

The Same Idea, Made Large

A windmill works the way a firki works. Wind arrives, the wings turn, and the turning can be put to use. It might run a flour mill. It might pull water up from a well. Most often now it is used to generate electricity.

Wind Farms

Put a large number of windmills together on one stretch of land and you have a wind farm, built to turn the energy of the wind into electricity. India has many. Muppandal in Tamil Nadu, Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and Brahmanvel in Maharashtra are among the leading ones.

Why Any of This Counts

Air is the first of the treasures Ajji talks about, and it makes the point about all of them. It is free, it is everywhere, it is invisible, and nothing alive lasts long without it. The wind farms show the second point: a treasure can be put to work as well as simply used.

Scenario:

A class reads that of every hundred parts of air, 78 are nitrogen, 21 are oxygen and 1 is everything else. Rohit says oxygen must be the main gas because we breathe it. Their teacher asks the class to draw the figures as a hundred squares, shading each gas. The picture surprises them. Oxygen fills about a fifth of the grid and nitrogen takes up more than three-quarters. Sana works out what that means. The gas we depend on most is not the gas there is most of, so how much there is and how much it matters are two different questions.

Analysis:

Drawing the hundred squares separates importance from quantity. Oxygen is a fifth of the air and nearly all of why we can breathe it.

Activity:

Draw a ten by ten grid and shade 78, 21 and 1 squares for the gases of air. Write one sentence on what surprised you.

Title:

Build a firki and find the wind

Safety:

An all-pin is sharp at both ends. Push it in with the flat of your thumb, keep the point away from your face, and ask an adult to help with the pinning.

What You Notice:

It will not turn in still air, which is the useful result. Every time it does turn, something was moving the air: your breath, your running, or the wind outside. A firki is a wind detector before it is a toy, and a windmill is the same detector built large enough to do work.

Muppandal in Tamil Nadu, Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and Brahmanvel in Maharashtra hold three of the largest wind farms in the country.

A windmill can be set to run a flour mill or to draw water up from a well, not only to make electricity.

A firki is cut from a single square of paper about 15 cm across, pinned to a soft stick.

The composition of air — Seventy-eight, twenty-one, one — Nitrogen, then oxygen, then everything else put together.

How long the body waits — Days for food, minutes for air — Which of the three is most urgent is settled by that one line.

Filling the Troughs

Bhoomi and Surya help Ajji fill the water troughs for the cows, and then water the vegetables and the medicinal herbs in the garden. Ajji shows them how to do it so that every drop lands where it is wanted and none of it runs away wasted. It is a small lesson, and the whole topic is inside it.

What We Use It For

Make your own list and it grows quickly. Drinking. Cooking. Bathing. Washing clothes and utensils. Cleaning the house. Beyond the home there is more: crops will not grow without it, and industries need it in large quantities. Very little of an ordinary day happens without water somewhere in it.

How Much There Is

Water covers about two-thirds of the surface of the Earth. Seen from far enough away the planet is mostly blue. From that fact alone you would expect water to be the last thing anybody ever ran short of.

And Why That Is Misleading

Most of that water lies in the oceans and the seas, and it is saline, which simply means salty. Saline water is not fit for use in homes, on farms or in industry. The single largest store of water on the planet is of no direct use for any of the things we need water for.

Where the Usable Water Is

What those uses need is freshwater, and it is found in three sorts of place. Some is locked up as ice sheets and snow. Some runs on the surface as rivers and lies in lakes. Some is underground. Together they are a small share of the whole.

Present Is Not the Same as Reachable

Ice sheets and snow hold a great deal of freshwater, and none of it is easy to get at. Underground water is difficult to reach as well. What is left over, a very small fraction sitting in ponds, rivers, lakes and wells, is the part that can simply be taken. That fraction is what everybody lives on.

Ajji's Point, Made Properly

Now Ajji's care with the watering can looks different. Water is precious not because there is little of it but because so little of it is within reach. Nothing about the amount in the oceans changes what is available at a village tap.

Where It Goes to Waste

Go through an ordinary day and mark the places. Washing hands with the tap running. Washing clothes, washing utensils, taking a shower. Cooking, gardening, brushing teeth. For each one, ask how the water is wasted and what could be done differently. Most people are surprised by their own list.

Cutting the Waste

Some of the answers are very small habits. Turn the tap off when it is not actually being used. Get a leaking tap or pipe mended instead of living with it. Beyond habits there are two larger measures: water can be recycled, and rain can be harvested.

Spoiling What We Have

India has many rivers, streams and lakes, and plastic bags and wrappers float on far too many of them. Trash thrown into a water source pollutes it. So does waste from homes and from industries when it is dumped in. Polluted water is not fit for any living being to drink.

Not Everybody Has the Same Tap

Because freshwater sources are limited, many parts of India are short of water. In some places people walk long distances simply to fetch drinking water. Access is not shared out evenly, which is one more reason for using what there is with care.

Catching the Rain

Rainwater harvesting means collecting rain and storing it in large quantities for later use. It is done on the roofs of buildings, and in homes, housing societies and schools. It is not a new idea here. India has practised it for a very long time.

Stepwells

In Rajasthan they are called Bawadi and in Gujarat Vav. These are stepwells, built as an answer to how little water those regions get. Toorji ka Jhalra in Jodhpur is one you can still go and see. They were built for harvesting water, and the way they do it is worth understanding.

How a Stepwell Fills

A trench is dug deep into the ground and its walls are lined with blocks of stone. The stones are laid so that water can seep through them. So the well takes in rain falling on it, and also water seeping in from lakes, ponds and rivers nearby. Two supplies, into one store.

Look for Your Own

Almost every region in India has some traditional way of holding on to water, shaped by how much rain it gets and what the ground is like. Ask a teacher or a grandparent what was done locally. It is usually older, and cleverer, than anybody expects.

Scenario:

A class is told that about two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered by water. Imran concludes that water shortages cannot be real. Their teacher asks what kind of water that is. Most of it sits in oceans and seas and is saline. The class then subtracts: what is left is a small fraction, and much of that is frozen or deep underground. They shade a hundred-square grid to see it. The usable portion is a sliver. Imran revises his conclusion. There is a great deal of water and very little of it is the kind a town can drink, which is why shortage and abundance are both true at once.

Analysis:

Two-thirds covered and still short, because covered counts salt water. The grid is what makes the usable sliver visible.

Activity:

Shade a hundred-square grid to show salt water, frozen water and usable fresh water. Write what the smallest part means for your town.

Title:

Audit a week of water

Safety:

Do not climb to reach a tap or open anything under a sink. Ask an adult before moving a bucket of water, and wipe up spills so nobody slips.

What You Notice:

The dripping tap is the row that changes minds, because the figure for a whole day is always larger than anybody guesses. The habits column fills up fastest for brushing teeth and washing utensils. Compare your third column with somebody else in the class: the suggestions that work are almost always the ones that cost nothing.

World Water Day falls on 22 March every year.

Bawadi is the name a stepwell goes by in Rajasthan, and Vav is the name it goes by in Gujarat.

The trench walls of a stepwell are lined with blocks of stone, which are laid so that water can seep through them.

Why so much water is useless to us — Most is salty, most of the rest is frozen or buried — What is left over is the small part we actually live on.

Three ways to save it — Close the tap, mend the leak, catch the rain — One habit, one repair, and one thing to build.

Drying Chillies

On a sunny day Bhoomi and Surya help Ajji spread chillies out to dry. Ajji explains why. The heat of the Sun takes the moisture out of them. Dried chillies can then be used later in the year, when fresh ones are not to be had. She promises them some to carry home.

A Claim Worth Testing

Then Ajji says something larger. Energy on Earth comes chiefly from the Sun, and every plant and animal here leans on it. That is a very big claim, and it is worth pulling apart rather than simply agreeing with.

The Obvious Uses First

Heat and light from the Sun get used all day without anybody noticing. Clothes dry on a line. Mangoes are cut and spread out. Grain is laid in the yard. None of it needs fuel, and none of it needs paying for. Make a list of your own and it gets long.

The Argument by the Field

One afternoon the children pass a field where a cow is grazing. Surya says the cow is getting its energy from the grass, not from the Sun. Bhoomi says the cow is getting it from the Sun. They look at the same animal and disagree completely.

Where Surya Is Right

Surya has noticed something correct. A cow standing in sunshine is not taking energy in through its back. Sunlight falling on an animal does not feed it. If that were the test, anybody could skip lunch by sitting outside.

Where Bhoomi Is Right

But follow the grass. Grass is a plant, and its leaves need sunlight in order to grow. The energy stored in that grass came from sunlight in the first place. When the cow eats it, that is where the energy has come from. Bhoomi is right about the source, and Surya is right about the route.

How Plants Do It

Sunlight helps plants prepare food. That is the step the whole argument turns on, and it is the step that makes plants different from animals. A plant makes its own food; an animal has to go and find some.

The Chain, Written Out

A plant draws energy from the Sun and makes food with it. An animal feeds on that plant and grows. Our own food comes from plants and animals alike. Every link leads back to the same place, which is why the Sun is called the main source of energy.

Your Own Breakfast

Try it on whatever you ate this morning. Rice, wheat, a vegetable: a plant grew it using sunlight. Milk or an egg: an animal made it after eating plants. There is no third possibility hiding anywhere on the plate.

Panels on a Roof

Solar panels are a common sight now: up on roofs, above street lights, and on traffic signals. They capture the energy of the Sun and produce electricity from it. Once they are in place they go on doing it every sunny day with nothing burnt.

Cooking and Heating

The energy can also be used directly, without turning it into electricity first. A solar cooker cooks food with it. A solar water heater warms water with it. Both are simply ways of catching what was arriving anyway.

A Question to Sit With

What would happen if the Sun were not visible for a few days? Lights would have to be switched on during the day, which is the answer everybody gives first. Keep going and the list gets serious. Washing would not dry, and nor would chillies. Panels would make no electricity. Plants would be short of what they need in order to grow.

A Matter of Gratitude

Across a great many homes in this country, water is offered to the Sun at first light, and it is meant as thanks. The custom is much older than any solar panel, and it rests on the same observation Ajji is making.

What the Chapter Is Doing

Air, then water, and now the Sun. Each is free, each is everywhere, and each turns out to be holding up something we could not manage without. The Sun is the one that stands behind the other treasures as well.

Settling It Properly

So who won the argument by the field? Both children did, and neither of them alone. The cow gets its energy from the grass, and the grass got its energy from the Sun. Say only the first half and you have missed where it came from. Say only the second and you cannot explain why the cow still has to eat.

Scenario:

A class is asked where the energy in a glass of milk comes from. Most answer the cow. Their teacher asks what the cow eats, and the answer is grass. The class traces it one step further and reaches sunlight, because the grass prepares its own food using it. Nita then asks whether a person standing in the sun gets energy the same way. They work out that we cannot, because we have no way of making food from light, so our share has to arrive through a plant. The class writes the chain out and sees that every link but the first is a passenger.

Analysis:

The chain is milk, cow, grass, Sun, and only the grass can use the Sun directly. Everything after it is carried.

Activity:

Write the energy chain for two foods you ate today. Mark the plant in each chain and how many steps it is from you.

Title:

Trace one meal back to the Sun

Safety:

This is a paper exercise. Do not taste or handle anything raw, and wash your hands before you start writing near food.

What You Notice:

Everything gets there in the end, though some items take three or four steps. Salt and water are the rows people argue about, because neither is food that anything grew. Milk and eggs are the useful rows: they take two steps rather than one, and that extra step is exactly what the cow argument was about.

Water is offered to the rising Sun in a great many Indian homes, by way of thanks.

Solar panels are fitted on rooftops, on top of street lights and on traffic signals.

Cut raw mangoes are spread in hot sun for several days to dry them, and dried chillies keep for the season when fresh ones are gone.

The chain from the Sun to a meal — Sun, plant, animal, plate — Four steps, and the first one is where all of it begins.

Settling the cow argument — Standing in it is not eating it — The cow gets the Sun through the grass, not through its back.

A Walk Into the Forest

Ajji takes Bhoomi and Surya out for a morning walk in the forest. They find herbs, shrubs and trees of many kinds growing close together. Ajji gives them the definition as they walk. A forest is a wide stretch of land packed thickly with plants of many kinds.

The Gooseberries on the Ground

They gather some nellikai, the Kannada name for Indian gooseberries, that have fallen. Ajji explains the village rule. Fruit is not plucked from the trees. What has fallen may be collected, and the rest is left for the animals and the birds.

What a Forest Gives

Make a list of products that come out of a forest and it gets long quickly. Beyond that, a forest is where a great many wild creatures live naturally, birds and insects among them, and it feeds them and shelters them. Every animal there depends on other life forms to live.

Diversity Has a Job

The range of life forms in a forest is not decoration. It is what makes sure there is food for every living being in it. Take enough of that variety away and the arrangement stops working for the ones left behind.

The Cover Is Shrinking

Year on year the country has been losing forest, and what people do is behind it, above all the felling of trees on a large scale. The difficulty is the timescale. Growing a new forest, or restoring one that has been lost, takes many years. So forests have to be used responsibly, with enough time left for them to regenerate.

People Who Stood in the Way

India has an old tradition of respecting and protecting forests, sacred groves among them. The Chipko movement is the famous modern example. It began in the early 1970s in Uttarakhand, then part of Uttar Pradesh. Local women took an active part, encircling and hugging the trees so that they could not be felled.

A Festival for Planting

Van Mahotsav runs for a week every July, across the country. New plants and trees go into the ground and awareness of forests is raised. The aim is to increase the green cover, and there is nothing stopping a class from organising one locally.

Damp Ground and Fallen Leaves

Walking back, the children notice how many leaves are lying on the ground and how damp the soil feels. Ajji explains both. Plant roots grip the soil, which is what keeps rain from carrying it off. The fallen leaves decay and enrich the soil with nutrients.

Recycling, Without the Word

Fresh plants and trees then grow in that soil. Nothing was carried in and nothing was taken away. Ajji calls it an example of recycling in nature, and it is happening under every tree in the forest at once.

Digging the Garden

Back at the house they help prepare the garden soil for vegetables. Ajji has them dig gently and break up the lumps. The reason is one they already know: the spaces between soil particles hold the air a seed needs, and give the roots room to push through.

What Is Actually in Soil

Bhoomi and Surya spot small pebbles, plant roots, and a few earthworms. Earthworms are natural agents that turn and loosen the soil as they go. There is sand in it, and insects, and many small organisms too small for the naked eye to pick out.

Soil Samples Side by Side

Collect soil from several places around home and school and compare them. Note the colour of each and feel the texture. Look with the naked eye, then again through a magnifying lens. Samples from different places often differ in colour, because they contain different materials.

Where Soil Comes From

Soil is formed by the disintegration of rocks, which simply means their breaking apart. The Sun does some of that work, water does some, and living organisms do some. It is not quick. The process runs over thousands of years.

Rocks at Work

Rock goes into houses and larger buildings, into temples, into roads and dams, and into the tops of tables. Slate is laid across roofs, and laterite serves for building much as a brick does. Granite, sandstone and marble are among the important ones. People have been making hand axes and arrowheads from rock for thousands of years.

What Rocks Are Made Of

Minerals are what they consist of. Aluminium, gold, copper and iron all get drawn out of minerals, which go on to serve in aeroplanes, in cars, in jewellery, in cosmetics and in electrical goods. Even a plain mobile phone holds about a dozen of them, gold and silver and copper and cobalt among them. Rocks take thousands to millions of years to form, so they too have to be used with care.

Scenario:

A class discusses a plan to clear a patch of forest for a car park. Arjun says a few trees are a small price. Their teacher asks the class to list everything the patch currently provides. Shelter and food for birds, insects and animals, roots that hold the soil, shade, and fallen leaves that feed the soil beneath. The list runs to eleven items. The class then asks which of them a car park also provides, and the answer is none. Arjun changes his position. He had been counting the trees, and the cost turns out to be everything the trees were supporting.

Analysis:

Counting trees undercounts a forest. The patch was doing eleven jobs and only one of them was being visible.

Activity:

Pick a green patch near you and list everything it provides. Write what would be lost if it became a road.

Title:

Three soils, side by side

Safety:

Do not take soil from a drain or from anywhere with garbage in it, because that soil can carry germs. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap afterwards, and do not put your hands near your face while you are working.

What You Notice:

The lens column is always longer than the naked eye column, and that gap is the finding. Roots, sand grains and small pebbles turn up in almost every sample. Colour is where the three usually differ most, and the reason is that they contain different materials. If one sample has an earthworm in it, that is the sample from the richest ground.

The Chipko movement began in the early 1970s in Uttarakhand, and local women encircled and hugged trees to stop them being felled.

Van Mahotsav is a week-long forest festival held across the country in July, when new plants and trees are planted.

A basic mobile phone contains about a dozen minerals, among them gold, silver, copper and cobalt.

What makes soil out of rock — Sun, water, living things, and a very long wait — Three agents doing the breaking, and time doing the rest.

The forest floor cycle — Leaf falls, soil gains, plant grows — Three steps, and then it starts over.

A Question at the Fuel Station

Bhoomi and Surya pass a fuel station and Bhoomi asks why different vehicles pull up at different pumps. Surya has the answer. They do not all run on the same fuel. Petrol and diesel are two, and there are others.

A Survey Worth Doing

Take a notebook into your own neighbourhood and record what you see. Which types of vehicles are there, and what fuel does each one use? A simple two-column table is enough, and the pattern in it will be clear before you have filled twenty rows.

The Two Commonest

For vehicles, petrol and diesel are the two in widest use by far. Along with kerosene, both of them are obtained from petroleum, which is why one raw material stands behind so much of what moves on the roads.

The Family Name

Petroleum, natural gas and coal are grouped together and called fossil fuels. The name is not about how they are used but about where they came from, and that is the more interesting question.

Where They Came From

Each grew out of the remains of tiny organisms and of plants that ended up buried far below ground. Over an enormous stretch of time those remains were converted into petroleum, natural gas and coal. How long? Millions of years for each of them.

The Other Two, at Work

Natural gas is used for cooking and for generating electricity, and in compressed form, as CNG, it runs vehicles, burning cleaner than either petrol or diesel. Coal goes mostly into making electricity, and several parts of India have it.

The Arithmetic Nobody Likes

Fossil fuels are found in limited quantities. Go on using them the way we do now and we will run out of them. That is the whole argument for looking at alternate sources of energy, and it does not depend on anybody being fond of the environment.

And What Burning Them Does

Set a fossil fuel alight and what comes off it is smoke together with carbon dioxide, and the air is fouled by both. Depending on them so heavily for transport and for cooking has caused large scale air pollution. So there are two separate problems: the supply, and the smoke.

Doing Our Bit

Walk or cycle to places that are near. Use public transport, which carries many people on one engine rather than one person on each. Both cut the fuel burnt without anybody having to invent anything new.

Naming the Whole Category

Everything the chapter has dealt with fills a need. Heat and light come from the Sun, water comes from rivers, food comes from plants and animals. Resources we get from nature like this are called natural resources.

And the Other Category

We also make things from those resources to suit ourselves. Electric bulbs. Furniture. Solar panels. Bicycles. Anything people have created in that way carries the name human-made resource. The materials still came from nature; the arrangement did not.

The Division That Matters

A natural process puts some of these resources back as time passes, and leaves others untouched. That single difference sorts the whole list into two, and it is the last idea in the chapter.

Why Only Fallen Nellikai

Ajji's rule turns out to be an example. Leaving fruit on the tree means enough for the animals and birds, and seeds in their droppings let new trees grow. It takes some years before those trees fruit, but the supply comes back. Whatever nature makes good again inside a span worth waiting through is called a renewable resource. Air is one, and so are water and forests.

The Other Half of the List

Making a fossil fuel runs over millions of years. Only so much of it exists, and what gets used is gone. Nothing puts any back inside a span worth waiting through. These are non-renewable resources, and minerals, rocks and soil belong on that side, along with coal, petroleum and natural gas.

The Drive Back Into the City

On the way home the children notice the skyline change colour and the air begin to smell. There are very few trees and they can smell smoke from the vehicles. Amma explains that burning fossil fuels in vehicles generates that smoke, and points out the electric ones, which release none. Effort is going into building alternatives, and the list of what we use every day is where each of us gets to start.

Title:

Sort one day into two columns

Safety:

This is a paper exercise. Do not open gas cylinders, touch fuel of any kind, or go near a vehicle engine to check what it runs on. Ask an adult instead.

What You Notice:

The indirectly column is where the surprise sits. A bus ride looks like one resource and turns out to involve petroleum, minerals and rubber. Almost every N row traces back to something that took millions of years to form. Compare totals with a friend and the lists differ, but the balance between R and N usually does not.

Scenario:

A school has added a new block, and the power supply to it fails most afternoons. The head teacher has money for one thing only and three suggestions on the table. The clerk wants a diesel generator, because it works the moment it is switched on and everybody understands it. A science teacher wants solar panels on the roof of the new block, though they cost more at the start and do nothing after dark. A parent who runs a workshop wants the school to find out first what is actually using the electricity. The answer, she says, may be that nothing needs buying. The block sits beside the playground, and the classrooms have windows on two sides. The head teacher asks the class to advise her.

Analysis:

Each suggestion is answering a different question, and only one of the three asks what the problem actually is before spending anything on it.

Activity:

Spend one afternoon in your own classroom with a notebook. Every fifteen minutes, write down how many lights and fans are on, and whether the daylight coming through the windows would have been enough without them. At the end, work out for how many of those readings something was running that nobody needed. Take the figure to your class teacher with one suggestion attached.

Coal, wood and dung cakes were once the usual cooking fuels, and natural gas and LPG have gradually replaced them.

CNG stands for Compressed Natural Gas, and it is a cleaner fuel for vehicles than petrol or diesel.

Electric vehicles release no smoke at all, which is why they are part of the answer to city air pollution.

What counts as a fossil fuel — Coal, petroleum, natural gas — Three of them, all made from buried remains over millions of years.

The renewable test — Does nature replace it while we wait? — If yes it is renewable. If it takes millions of years, it is not.