Environment & Ecology Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 12

Nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, together written as nitrogen oxides, are air pollutants that come mainly from combustion in vehicles and power stations; they help form smog and acid rain but are not counted among the greenhouse gases of the natural atmosphere.

Six wetlands of Uttar Pradesh were designated as Ramsar sites in January 2020: Nawabganj, Parvati Arga, Saman, Samaspur, Sandi and Sarsai Nawar.

The National Green Tribunal was set up on 18 October 2010 under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010. It is a special court for cases about environmental protection, forests and other natural resources, and it is required to dispose of an application within six months.

The National Clean Air Programme was launched by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in January 2019 as a national framework to cut particulate pollution in cities that do not meet the national ambient air quality standards.

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar and came into force in 1975.

Namdapha lies in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh, covers about 1,985 square kilometres and is the largest protected area in the Eastern Himalayan sub-region.

Parliament passed the Environment (Protection) Act in 1986 and it came into force on 19 November 1986. It was enacted soon after the Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984, when the country needed one general law to fill the gaps left by the earlier pollution laws.

Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist and writer, published Silent Spring in 1962.

Lichens are used as bio-indicators of air quality because they are extremely sensitive to sulphur dioxide and other gases in the air.

The National Green Tribunal is not bound by the Code of Civil Procedure; it is guided by the principles of natural justice.

A gully plug is a small check structure built across a natural gully or stream channel in hilly and rural land, so it has no place in a city.

Cartagena is a port city on Colombia's Caribbean coast, where talks on the biosafety protocol were held in 1999. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety is a supplementary agreement to the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992.

These rules, notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 and in force from May 2012, made extended producer responsibility, or EPR, their central feature.

The Gulf of Cambay, or Khambhat, has no coral reefs because its water is muddy and its tides are among the strongest on India's coast.

Only statement 1 is correct: the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 creates CAMPA at both levels but does not make people's participation compulsory.

The 2016 Rules set out detailed criteria for choosing sites for landfills and waste processing facilities. The Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, replaced the Municipal Solid Wastes Rules of 2000.

The Act empowers the Centre to set emission and discharge standards, but it says nothing about public participation. The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 was passed after the Bhopal gas tragedy as an umbrella law under Article 253, to give effect to the decisions of the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

The Forest Rights Act names bamboo as minor forest produce and gives forest dwellers ownership of such produce, but the Indian Forest Act amendment did not allow felling of bamboo grown in forest areas.

Fertilised soils, cattle and poultry are all major sources of reactive nitrogen in the environment. Reactive nitrogen means nitrogen in forms other than the inert N₂ gas of the air, such as ammonia, nitrogen oxides, nitrous oxide and nitrate.

Carbofuran, methyl parathion, phorate and triazophos are all insecticides sprayed on crops, and all are highly toxic. Carbofuran is a carbamate; methyl parathion, phorate and triazophos are organophosphates.