Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 16

In 2019 the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation was merged with the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to create a single Ministry of Jal Shakti, so that irrigation, river basins, groundwater, drinking water supply and sanitation would be handled by one ministry.

A surangam is a tunnel about two metres high cut nearly level into the side of a laterite hill until it meets a seepage zone; the water that oozes out of the rock trickles along the floor of the tunnel and is collected in a pit outside, so the structure…

In the cold desert of Ladakh there is very little rain, so the water that matters is glacier melt.

In the old Magadh region of south Bihar the land slopes gently and the soil holds water poorly, so farmers cut long channels, the pynes, from the flood flow of rivers such as the Phalgu, Sakri and Morhar and led the water across the fields.

In the Khasi and Jaintia hills, spring and stream water on a hill slope is tapped and carried through a network of split bamboo pipes, channels and diversion sticks that step the flow down the slope and finally release it drop by drop at the root of each betel vine…

Zabo, a word that means impounding runoff, is practised around Kikruma village in the Phek district of Nagaland.

A tanka is a covered underground tank, usually sunk in a courtyard or beneath a house in western Rajasthan, into which rain falling on the paved courtyard or the roof is led through a filter and stored for drinking right through the dry months.

India keeps 2 December as National Pollution Control Day because the leak of methyl isocyanate at Bhopal began on the night of 2 December 1984; the day is used to review pollution control laws and to remember those killed.

Parliament passed it under Article 253, to give effect to the Stockholm Conference decisions, and in the direct shadow of the Bhopal leak of December 1984.

The Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011 shut the reactors down as designed, but the tsunami that arrived minutes later flooded the emergency diesel generators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Japan's Pacific coast.

From 5 to 9 December 1952 an anticyclone settled over London, a temperature inversion trapped the smoke and sulphur dioxide of domestic coal fires, and the resulting smog killed thousands.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury was adopted at Kumamoto, Japan, in 2013 and entered into force in 2017.

Mining waste carrying cadmium entered the Jinzu river in Toyama Prefecture and reached people through irrigated rice and drinking water.

The Chisso Corporation discharged methylmercury compounds into Minamata Bay in Kumamoto Prefecture; the mercury accumulated through fish and shellfish into the people who ate them and attacked the central nervous system, producing numbness, loss of coordination, blindness and congenital deformity.

Reactor Number 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the town of Pripyat, exploded on 26 April 1986. The site then lay in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR and lies in independent Ukraine today, which is why the question is usually framed as present-day country.

The leak at the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal began late on 2 December 1984 and the gas spread through the early hours of 3 December, which is why India observes 2 December as National Pollution Control Day.

Methyl isocyanate, or MIC, was stored at the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal as an intermediate for making the pesticide carbaryl.

Polyaromatic hydrocarbons are soot-related pollutants from incomplete burning; they are not among the gases that make up photochemical smog. Photochemical smog forms on warm, sunny days in cities with heavy traffic.

Buried organic waste rots without air in a landfill, and bacteria that work without oxygen release methane. Food scraps, paper and garden waste make up a large share of city garbage.

The number after PM gives the upper size limit of the particles in micrometres. Particulate matter is classed by aerodynamic diameter: PM10 is 10 micrometres or less, PM2.5 is 2.5 micrometres or less, and PM1 is 1 micrometre or less, about one-seventieth of a human hair's width.