Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 23

A pyramid of energy is always upright because energy is lost as heat at every step of a food chain, so each higher trophic level holds less energy than the one below it.

Haryali is a centrally sponsored watershed development project launched in 2003 by the Ministry of Rural Development, and its whole point is that the village panchayat plans and carries out the work itself.

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.

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.

Most renewable sources depend on the weather, so the power they give is intermittent rather than steady. Solar panels make nothing at night and little under thick cloud, wind turbines stop when the wind drops, and hydropower falls away in a weak monsoon.

Overgrazing is a cause of soil degradation, not a way to conserve soil, so it is the option that does not belong.

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.

Goal 15, called Life on Land, is the goal for land ecosystems, and its wording covers forests, desertification, land degradation and the loss of biodiversity.

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

The Narmada Bachao Andolan grew up against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada. The movement began in 1985 under Medha Patkar, with Baba Amte and others joining later.

Humus is the dark, formless material left in soil after decomposers have broken down dead leaves, roots and animal remains; it resists further microbial attack and decays only very slowly, which makes it the long term store of carbon and nutrients in soil and a key step in every biogeochemical…

In 2018 the Union Environment Ministry started a pilot project to clean up and develop selected beaches so that they could win the Blue Flag.

A shelter belt is a row or a block of trees and shrubs planted across the direction of the prevailing wind.

Project Elephant was launched in February 1992 as a centrally sponsored scheme to help the states protect elephants, their habitats and their corridors, to reduce conflict between elephants and human beings and to improve the welfare of captive elephants.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and these are broken into 169 targets.

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

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 aquifer is a body of rock or loose sediment that is both saturated with groundwater and permeable enough to let that water move freely, so a well sunk into it keeps yielding water.

Phosphorus has no stable gaseous compound in nature, so its reservoir is rock, chiefly the mineral apatite; it enters the soil only through slow weathering, passes through plants and animals, and returns to sediments, which makes it a purely sedimentary cycle and the slowest of the common cycles.

The question asks for the odd one out, and the heavy use of chemical fertilisers damages soil rather than conserving it: it acidifies the soil, kills soil microorganisms, leaves salt residues, and the surplus nitrate and phosphate wash into water bodies and cause eutrophication.