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If you are starting Class 9 this year, or your child is, the textbooks on the desk are not the ones older siblings used. NCERT has published new science and maths books for Grade 9, and CBSE's 2026-27 curriculum is built around them. This guide covers what is in each book, how CBSE marks it, what is new, and how to start working with it.
What are the new Class 9 books called?
The science book is Exploration. Its preliminary pages show a first edition dated April 2026 and describe 13 chapters. The book explains its name: exploring means investigating the unknown by observing, posing questions and experimenting. It integrates biology, chemistry, physics and earth science.
The maths book is Ganita Manjari, in two parts. Part I is a first edition dated April 2026 with 8 chapters. Part II, a first edition dated August 2026, carries on from Chapter 9 to Chapter 14. The book explains that Manjari means a bouquet of flowers in various Indian languages, with each topic a petal.
What is in Exploration?
The contents page lists these chapters:
Exploration: Entering the World of Secondary Science
Cell: The Building Block of Life
Tissues in Action
Describing Motion Around Us
Exploring Mixtures and their Separation
How Forces Affect Motion
Work, Energy, and Simple Machines
Journey Inside the Atom
Atomic Foundations of Matter
Sound Waves: Characteristics and Applications
Reproduction: How Life Continues
Patterns in Life: Diversity and Classification
Earth as a System: Energy, Matter, and Life
Chapter 1 is about how science works: scientific language, focused questions and simple experiments. Chapter 13 treats the Earth as connected spheres, with solar energy, winds and the water, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen cycles, according to the CBSE Class 9 science curriculum. The contents page has no separate chapter titled Gravitation.
How does CBSE mark Class 9 science?
The 2026-27 curriculum sets a 3-hour, 80-mark theory paper and 20 marks of internal assessment. It groups the chapters into units:
World of Living (Chapters 2, 3, 11, 12): 27 marks
Matter, Its Nature and Behaviour (Chapters 5, 8, 9): 25 marks
Motion, Force, Work and Sound (Chapters 4, 6, 7, 10): 23 marks
Earth as a System (Chapter 13): 5 marks
Internal assessment is 5 marks each for periodic assessment, multiple assessment, portfolio and practical work. The practical list includes measuring the mechanical advantage of a lever and checking Newton's second law with a trolley, pulley and hanging masses.
What is in Ganita Manjari?
Part I has: Orienting Yourself: The Use of Coordinates; Introduction to Linear Polynomials; The World of Numbers; Exploring Algebraic Identities; I'm Up and Down, and Round and Round (circles); Measuring Space: Perimeter and Area; The Mathematics of Maybe: Introduction to Probability; and Predicting What Comes Next: Exploring Sequences and Progressions.
Part II has: Propositions and their Converses; How Quantities Combine: Understanding Data; The World of Algorithms; Quadrilaterals; Two Variables, One Line; and Math of Space: Surface Area and Volume. Its preface says the data chapter covers weighted averages and stacked bar charts, and the algorithms chapter builds up to Euclid's method for the greatest common divisor.
The CBSE Class 9 maths curriculum gives the unit marks for the 80-mark paper: Number System 7, Algebra 20, Coordinate Geometry 4, Geometry 25, Mensuration 14, and Statistics and Probability 10. In that table, Algebra includes Sequences and Progressions.
What do the advanced-level documents cover?
The Science at Advanced Level document lists chapters such as Measurement, Newton's Laws of Motion, Structure of Atom, Chemical Bonding, Microscope and Microscopy, and a chapter on biotechnology. The Mathematics at Advanced Level document covers Sets, Logarithms, Relations and Functions, Coordinate Geometry, Combinatorics and more progressions. These are optional; the standard curriculum is what every student studies.
What do new-style questions look like? Three worked examples
Science, Chapter 7. The curriculum's practical uses M.A. = Load / Effort. A lever lifts a 300 N load with a 100 N effort. M.A. = 300 / 100 = 3. The lever multiplies your force three times. Common mistake: writing Effort / Load and getting 1/3. If M.A. is less than 1 for a lever that makes lifting easier, you have flipped it.
Maths, Chapter 1. Find the distance between A(1, 2) and B(4, 6). The differences are 4 − 1 = 3 and 6 − 2 = 4. Distance = √(3² + 4²) = √25 = 5 units. Common mistake: adding the differences (3 + 4 = 7) instead of squaring them.
Maths, Chapter 8. A geometric progression starts 3, 6, 12. Each term is double the last, so r = 2. The 6th term is 3 × 2⁵ = 3 × 32 = 96. Common mistake: using 2⁶, which skips the fact that the first term already counts as one.
How should students and parents start with the new books?
Read the "About this Book" pages first. Exploration explains its features, such as Think It Over questions and the Revise, Reflect, Refine exercises. Knowing what each box is for tells you how to use it.
Do the activities, not just the text. The curriculum's practicals are part of internal assessment, and many chapters are built around experiments.
Be careful with older guides. Chapter numbers and titles have changed, so match every guide or worksheet to the new contents page.
Revisit Class 8 ideas. If Class 8 felt shaky, our guide to the new Class 8 NCERT books shows what came before. For a familiar physics topic, see work and energy for Class 9.
If a new idea in a chapter is not clicking, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing, so you can read a second explanation alongside the textbook.
Download the contents pages of Exploration and Ganita Manjari today and tick off Chapter 1 of each this week.
