Environment & Ecology Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 5

Action for Climate Empowerment is the UNFCCC's own name for its work on climate education and public awareness, and it covers the Paris Agreement too.

Tropical rainforests hold more plant and animal species than any other land ecosystem. These forests cover only about six to seven per cent of the Earth's land, yet they are thought to hold more than half of all known land species.

Carbon markets are a leading climate tool, but they work by moving money between emitters and those who cut emissions, not from the private sector to the State.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol sprays and foams were the main cause of ozone depletion in the twentieth century.

Burning coal, petrol and diesel releases oxides of sulphur and nitrogen (and carbon), which dissolve in rain water to form acids.

Of all the sunlight that falls on their leaves, green plants fix only about one per cent as chemical energy in food.

The Malabar Civet and the Sambar Deer are active after sunset, while the Lion-tailed Macaque is a daytime animal.

The sundari is a mangrove tree of the tidal deltaic forests of the Coasts biogeographic zone, and the Sundarbans of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta take their name from it; its wood is hard and durable, and like other mangroves it has salt tolerant roots and breathing roots in the waterlogged mud.

India has no native marsupials, but marsupials are not confined to predator-free montane grasslands. Marsupials are mammals whose young are born at a very early stage and usually grow further in the mother's pouch.

The gaur, also called the Indian bison, is the wild bovine closest to domestic cattle and is protected in the Nagarhole and Bandipur national parks of Karnataka.

An ecotone is the transition zone where two different ecosystems meet and mix, such as the belt between a grassland and a forest, an estuary between a river and the sea, or a mangrove strip between land and ocean.

An endemic species is one that occurs naturally in one particular area and nowhere else, and the Nicobar pigeon is the textbook Indian example, living in the forests of the Nicobar group of islands; the Andaman wild pig and the Narcondam hornbill are usually listed beside it.

The Kyoto Protocol set its target on a basket of six greenhouse gases, to be cut by an average of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels.

The Wild Ass Sanctuary lies in the Little Rann of Kachchh in Gujarat and is the last home of the Indian wild ass, locally called the khur, a Schedule I animal that grazes on the raised patches of grass known as bets in the salt desert.

Itai-Itai disease was first identified in Japan among people who ate rice grown with water polluted by cadmium from mining waste.

The Rajgir Zoo Safari stands at Rajgir in Nalanda district of Bihar, in the hills around the old Magadhan capital of Rajgriha.

It is India's first national park, set up in 1936 as Hailey National Park, in the Nainital area of present-day Uttarakhand.

NTU stands for Nephelometric Turbidity Unit. A nephelometer shines a beam of light through a water sample and measures how much of it is scattered sideways by suspended particles such as clay, silt, algae and microbes; the more the scattering, the more turbid, or cloudy, the water is.

Itai-itai disease is long-term cadmium poisoning, first noticed around 1912 in the Toyama region of Japan, where mines upstream released cadmium into the Jinzu river and it built up in the rice and water used by villagers.

Nokrek Biosphere Reserve is in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya; Manas is in Assam along the Bhutan border; Similipal is in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha; and Seshachalam lies in the Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh.