Environment & Ecology Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 4

The Red Data Book is the source book that keeps a record of endangered animals, plants and fungi, so that governments and conservationists know which living species face the greatest risk of dying out.

Producers, the green plants and algae, are the most numerous living part of an ecosystem because every other organism depends on them for food.

Rain with a pH below 5.6 is called acid rain. Even clean rain is slightly acidic, with a pH of about 5.6, because carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in it to form weak carbonic acid; that is why 5.6, not 7, is the dividing line.

The ozone layer shields us from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, so when it thins, that protection is lost. It lies in the stratosphere, roughly 15 to 35 km above the Earth, and absorbs most of the UV-B and UV-C radiation.

A forest forms and runs on its own, without any human effort, so it is a natural ecosystem.

A johad is a small crescent-shaped earthen dam that villagers build together to catch and store rainwater. It is used mainly in Rajasthan and Haryana, where rain is scarce and falls in only a few months of the year.

The United Nations General Assembly named 5 June as World Environment Day in 1972, and the day has been observed every year since 1974.

Sulphur dioxide and nitric oxide are the gases behind acid rain. When coal, petrol and diesel are burnt in power plants, factories and vehicles, they release sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen such as nitric oxide.

Each fig species is pollinated only by its own tiny fig wasp, and the two have evolved together over millions of years.

Project Tiger was launched on 1 April 1973 by the Government of India under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, from Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand, to save the Bengal tiger and its habitat.

The species was named Trimeresurus arunachalensis, the Arunachal pit viper, after the state where it was found. Pit vipers are venomous snakes with a heat-sensing pit between each eye and nostril, which lets them detect warm-blooded prey in the dark.

The word comes from the Sanskrit 'chitraka', meaning the spotted or speckled one, and reached English through the Hindi 'cheeta'.

COP-27 was the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and its parties meet every year at a COP.

Both statements are correct, because Biodiversity Management Committees are the grassroots bodies through which India carries out access and benefit sharing.

Each activity is a recognised way of pulling carbon dioxide out of circulation and locking it away.

Energy passes one way from the Sun through the food chain and is lost as heat, while nutrients are used again and again.

All three treaties deal with hazardous chemicals and wastes, and they share a joint secretariat under UNEP. The Basel Convention (1989) controls the movement of hazardous wastes across borders and their disposal, mainly to stop rich countries dumping waste in poorer ones.

Gold mining and coal burning are the two biggest human sources of mercury, and no level of exposure is known to be safe.

Only statement 2 is correct: the biofilter's job in a Recirculating Aquaculture System is to turn toxic ammonia into much less harmful nitrate.

Climate Neutral Now takes its aim from the Paris Agreement, but the target it works towards is a climate-neutral world by the middle of the century, not by 2030.