Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 28

A reef building coral polyp lives in a close partnership with single celled algae called zooxanthellae that live inside its own tissue.

In the tundra only a thin upper layer of the ground thaws in the brief summer; below it the soil stays frozen through the year, and this permanently frozen subsoil is called permafrost.

Succession is a directional process: each community changes the place a little, making it fit for the next, until a community arrives that is in balance with the climate of the region and can replace itself generation after generation without being replaced by another.

Primary succession starts on a surface that has never held life, a cooled lava flow, a bare rock or a fresh sand dune, and the slowest part of the whole process there is the making of soil: rock has to be weathered grain by grain and organic matter has to…

A bare rock offers no soil, almost no water and no shelter, and only an organism that can survive long spells of drying and can hold on to bare stone can settle there.

The temperate grassland is the same biome the world over, short nutritious grass with almost no tree, but each continent gives it a local name, and the pairs are asked directly in examinations.

The taiga forms an almost unbroken belt of needle leaved softwood trees, mainly pine, spruce, fir and larch, right across the northern parts of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, and this belt covers a greater area of land than any other biome.

The savanna is a tropical grassland with tall coarse grass and scattered flat topped trees, and its wet season produces an enormous crop of grass.

Kyushu is one of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago and is of volcanic origin, built by the eruptions of an island arc where one plate dives beneath another; Mount Aso on it has one of the largest volcanic calderas in the world.

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for well over two thousand kilometres along the Queensland coast in the Coral Sea, off the north eastern shore of Australia, and is the largest structure on earth built by living organisms.

The United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization jointly created the panel in 1988 to give governments a common scientific basis for climate policy.

The tiger range countries met at a summit in St Petersburg in Russia in 2010 and agreed to work towards doubling the number of wild tigers, and 29 July was adopted as International Tiger Day, also called Global Tiger Day, at that meeting.

On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984 methyl isocyanate leaked from a pesticide plant at Bhopal and killed thousands of people in the surrounding settlements, and India keeps 2 December as National Pollution Control Day in memory of the victims and as a reminder of the need for…

The index is academic work, produced by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy together with a centre at Columbia University, and it ranks countries on indicators of environmental health and ecosystem vitality.

Its central measure, the Living Planet Index, is prepared with the Zoological Society of London and shows how populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians have changed over time.

The report compares the emission cuts that countries have actually promised with the cuts the world would need to hold warming to agreed limits, and the difference between the two is the gap of the title; UNEP releases it shortly before the annual climate conference.

It has brought out the report once in two years since 1987, assessing forest cover and tree cover state by state from satellite imagery.

The Convention on Wetlands was signed on 2 February 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shore of the Caspian Sea, and it is the oldest of the modern global conservation treaties; the day has been observed on that anniversary since 1997.

The correct answer is B, the Montreal Protocol, which was signed on 16 September 1987 and commits countries to phasing out chlorofluorocarbons and other substances that destroy stratospheric ozone; the day is formally called the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer.

The United Nations General Assembly designated this date after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm in 1972, and the day has been observed since 1974, each year with a fresh theme and a host country, with the United Nations Environment Programme leading it.