Can you answer the following questions?
 

1. What is a ‘season’?
2. What seasons do we experience in India?
3. Write three differences between summer, monsoon and winter.
4. Are seasons (particularly summer and winter) experienced everywhere on the Earth?
5. Do you think if it is summer in India it is summer everywhere in the world? If no, how do seasons differ in different parts of the world?
6. Why do we have seasons on the Earth?

A season is a division of the year marked by changes in weather, ecology, and amount of daylight. In India we usually divide the year into three seasons: summer, monsoon and winter. On an average, the temperature remains high in summers and low in winter. Monsoon is a season of rains. The monsoon is a speciality of tropical regions, particularly South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc.), and its English name ‘monsoon’ is derived from Hindi / Arabic word ‘mausam’ (मौसम). Summer and winter, however, are experienced all over the world. You might have learned about the water cycle and how we get rains. Now let us learn why we have summer and winter.
 
Before we go ahead, think about how summer and winter happen. Why do you think it is hotter in some part of the year and colder in another?
 
Here are the two reasons:

I. Variation in duration of day and night: Have you noticed that the Sun rises early and sets late in the summer, but it rises late and sets early in the winter? Effectively, we get sunlight for a longer time in the summer than in winter. The sun follows a shorter arc in winter and a longer arc in summer (Figure 2).                                                                                   

Figure 2: Changes in the path of the Sun over a year on the Tropic of Cancer