Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 24

Rhizobium is a bacterium that lives in a symbiotic relationship with legumes such as gram, pea, bean, groundnut and arhar, forming nodules on their roots in which it converts nitrogen gas into ammonia using the enzyme nitrogenase; this is why legumes are grown in rotation to restore soil nitrogen.

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.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification was adopted at Paris on 17 June 1994 and it entered into force in December 1996.

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…

That is the wording of Sustainable Development Goal 6, the water and sanitation goal. The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda, and they replaced the eight Millennium Development Goals.

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.

Nitrification happens in two stages, and the first is the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite by chemoautotrophic bacteria of the genera Nitrosomonas and Nitrococcus.

The savanna is a tropical grassland with tall coarse grass and scattered flat topped trees, and its wet season produces an enormous crop of grass.

The day marks the anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification at Paris on 17 June 1994, and the United Nations General Assembly declared it in the same year so that governments would review progress on land restoration annually.

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

Denitrification is the reduction of nitrate to nitrogen gas, which escapes to the atmosphere and completes the nitrogen cycle; it is carried out by these bacteria in waterlogged soils where oxygen is scarce, and it is the reason farmers lose nitrogen from flooded fields.

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

Itai-itai, which means ouch-ouch in Japanese, was first recorded in the Jinzu river basin of Japan, where mine waste put cadmium into irrigation water and then into rice grown in the contaminated soil.

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.

Dry air is about seventy-eight per cent nitrogen by volume, which makes the atmosphere the great reservoir of the nitrogen cycle, yet the triple bond of the nitrogen molecule is so strong that plants and animals cannot use the gas directly and depend on fixation.

Tamil Nadu is the first state in India to make rooftop rainwater harvesting structures compulsory for all houses and buildings across the state, through a law brought in 2003.

India hosted the fourteenth Conference of the Parties to the UNCCD at Greater Noida near New Delhi in 2019, and the meeting closed with the New Delhi Declaration, in which the parties committed themselves to restoring degraded land and to working towards Land Degradation Neutrality.

Nitrogenase is the enzyme complex, containing molybdenum and iron, that breaks the triple bond of the nitrogen molecule and joins the atoms with hydrogen to make ammonia; it is destroyed by oxygen, which is why a root nodule keeps leghaemoglobin to mop oxygen up.

The Central Arid Zone Research Institute was set up at Jodhpur in Rajasthan in 1959 and works under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

The very high temperature of a lightning discharge supplies enough energy to break the triple bond of nitrogen, and the atoms join oxygen to give nitric oxide and then nitrogen dioxide, which dissolve in rain as nitrous and nitric acid and reach the soil as nitrate; this is physical or…