Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 12

On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the pesticide plant of Union Carbide India Limited at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, killing thousands of people and injuring many more.

The Chipko movement began in 1973 in the Garhwal Himalayas, in Chamoli district of what is now Uttarakhand, when villagers hugged trees to stop contractors from felling them.

A secondary pollutant is never emitted from a source; it is manufactured in the atmosphere itself when primary pollutants react with one another or with sunlight.

Biogas is produced when cattle dung, crop waste and sewage are broken down by bacteria in a closed tank without air, a process called anaerobic digestion.

The ozone layer lies in the stratosphere, roughly 15 to 35 km above the ground, with the thickest concentration near 20 to 25 km, and that belt is sometimes called the ozonosphere.

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

This describes geothermal energy. Molten rock pushed up from deep inside the Earth collects as hot spots at shallower depths, and groundwater trapped near them is heated until it becomes steam under high pressure.

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.

Ashtamudi is a backwater lake in Kollam district of Kerala and the second largest estuarine system in the state after Vembanad.

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

Mulching means covering the bare ground between plants with straw, dry leaves or crop waste, so that the soil holds moisture and raindrops cannot beat the topsoil loose.

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.

Space research is not one of the Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations General Assembly adopted seventeen such goals in September 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with 169 targets to be met by 2030; they replaced the Millennium Development Goals, which ran from 2000 to…

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.

Founded in 1948 and based in Switzerland, it maintains the Red List of Threatened Species, which grades species as least concern, near threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild or extinct.

Blue carbon is the carbon stored by marine and coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows.

Photochemical smog, also called Los Angeles smog, forms in warm, dry, sunny weather when oxides of nitrogen from vehicle exhaust and unburnt hydrocarbons react under ultraviolet light.

Mulching means covering the bare soil between plants with a layer of organic matter such as straw, dry leaves, husk or grass clippings.

The Stockholm Convention was adopted in 2001 and came into force in 2004.

Carbon monoxide binds to the haemoglobin of the blood roughly two hundred times more readily than oxygen does, and the carboxyhaemoglobin so formed cannot carry oxygen.