Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 40

The correct answer is C: the chamber lets short-wavelength radiation in but does not let long-wavelength infrared out, so heat is trapped.

Sunlight reaching a glasshouse is mostly visible light and short-wavelength (near) infrared, which glass transmits easily. The plants and soil inside absorb it, warm up and re-radiate the energy as long-wavelength infrared, because cooler bodies emit at longer wavelengths. Glass is largely opaque to this long-wave radiation, so the energy stays inside and the temperature rises. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane and nitrous oxide play the role of the glass, keeping the Earth about 33 °C warmer than it would otherwise be.

A is wrong: if no radiation entered, there would be no energy to trap.

B is wrong: it reverses the wavelengths; long waves are the ones held back.

D is wrong: if all infrared could escape freely, nothing would be trapped and no warming would occur.

Exam tip: in short, out long; glass and greenhouse gases stop the outgoing long-wave infrared.

The correct answer is C, the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. Section 3 of that Act gives the central government power to take all measures it thinks necessary to protect and improve the quality of the environment, and the EIA Notifications of 1994 and 2006 were both issued under it. The Act was passed in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 and is an umbrella law for environmental regulation. Option A is wrong because the Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972 deals with protected areas, schedules of species and hunting. Option B is wrong because the Water Act of 1974 created the pollution control boards and deals with effluent standards and consent to operate. Option D is wrong because the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 governs the diversion of forest land, for which a separate forest clearance is needed.

The correct answer is C, extremely fine particles of diameter less than 1 micron. The number after PM gives the upper size limit of the particles in micrometres.

Particulate matter is classed by aerodynamic diameter: PM10 is 10 micrometres or less, PM2.5 is 2.5 micrometres or less, and PM1 is 1 micrometre or less, about one-seventieth of a human hair's width. The smaller the particle, the deeper it travels: PM1 slips past the nose and throat, reaches the alveoli and can even pass into the blood, which is why it is linked with heart and lung disease. Such fine particles come mostly from vehicle exhaust, burning of fuel and crop residue, and industrial smoke.

A is wrong: particles larger than 10 micrometres are coarse dust, not PM1.

B is wrong: the nose traps mainly larger particles; PM1 is too fine to be filtered there.

D is wrong: PM1 is extremely fine, not coarse, and it is the fine particles, not coarse ones, that reach the bloodstream.

Exam tip: PM10 coarse, PM2.5 fine, PM1 ultra-fine; the smaller the number, the deeper it goes into the body.

The correct answer is D, the National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency. PAT is the best known of that mission's four initiatives: large energy-using factories in notified sectors are set a target to reduce their specific energy consumption, and a unit that saves more than its target earns tradable energy saving certificates, which a unit that falls short must buy. It is administered by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency under the Ministry of Power. Option A is wrong because the Water Mission's instrument is a target of 20 per cent better water use efficiency, not a trading scheme. Option B is wrong because the Green India Mission deals with afforestation and forest quality. Option C is wrong because the Solar Mission works through capacity targets, solar parks and manufacturing support. Link PAT to industry and to certificates, and the question answers itself.

The correct answer is B, plan of action outlined by the countries of the world to combat climate change. INDCs were the climate pledges countries announced before the Paris climate conference of 2015.

Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, each country was asked to state what it intended to do to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change after 2020. These Intended Nationally Determined Contributions were submitted before COP21 in Paris in December 2015. Once a country ratified the Paris Agreement, its INDC became its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), to be updated every five years with greater ambition. India's first INDC was submitted in October 2015.

A is wrong because refugee pledges have nothing to do with this term.

C is wrong because capital subscriptions to the AIIB are not called INDCs.

D is wrong because the Sustainable Development Goals are pursued through the 2030 Agenda, not through INDCs.

Exam tip: INDC before Paris (COP21, 2015) became NDC after ratification, revised every five years.

The correct answer is A, loss and damage from climate impacts. Loss and damage is the third pillar of climate policy, after mitigation and adaptation, and covers harm that can no longer be prevented: land lost to the sea, a crop destroyed by an extreme event, an island made uninhabitable. Small island states had demanded an institution for it for years, and the Warsaw mechanism of 2013 was the first. A dedicated fund was agreed at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022 and set up at Dubai in 2023. B is handled by the Kyoto mechanisms and by Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. C belongs to REDD-plus and to forest certification bodies outside the convention. D is the business of the Montreal Protocol, a separate treaty on the ozone layer.

The correct answer is C, 1 and 3 only. BirdLife International is a worldwide partnership of independent national conservation organisations, with its secretariat at Cambridge in the United Kingdom, so statement 1 is correct. It is also the body that identifies and maintains the inventory of Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas, the sites that hold key populations of birds, which makes statement 3 correct. Statement 2 is the trap: the concept of biodiversity hotspots was proposed by the British ecologist Norman Myers in 1988 and was later developed by Conservation International, not by BirdLife International. Because statement 2 is wrong, option D, which takes all three, falls away, and option B, which keeps statement 2 while dropping the correct statement 1, is doubly wrong. Option A is incomplete because it leaves out statement 3. Remember the pairing: hotspots belong to Myers and Conservation International, Important Bird Areas belong to BirdLife.

The correct answer is B, Pitti. Pitti is a tiny uninhabited coral islet in Lakshadweep, notified as the Pitti Bird Sanctuary, and is the breeding ground of sooty terns and other sea birds; it is the only wildlife sanctuary of the territory. Option A is wrong because Nalaban is the island sanctuary inside Chilika Lake in Odisha. Option C is wrong because Nal Sarovar is a shallow freshwater lake in Gujarat, a Ramsar site known for flamingos and pelicans. Option D is wrong because Deepor Beel is a Ramsar site and bird sanctuary on the edge of Guwahati in Assam, fed by the Brahmaputra. All three distractors are genuine bird areas, which is what makes the question a test of location rather than of names.

The correct answer is B, living organisms and physical factors. An ecosystem is a working unit in which a community of living organisms interacts with the non-living surroundings in a given area, so it must contain both halves. The living or biotic half has producers such as green plants, consumers such as herbivores and carnivores, and decomposers such as bacteria and fungi. The non-living or abiotic half has sunlight, temperature, water, air, soil, minerals and pH. Option A is wrong because organisms alone, without energy and nutrients from the physical surroundings, form only a community and not an ecosystem. Option D is wrong for the opposite reason: physical factors alone make a habitat, with no life to cycle the nutrients. Option C is far too narrow, since insects are only one group of consumers inside a much larger web. Remember the short definition: biotic plus abiotic, interacting, equals ecosystem.

The correct answer is D, Ecotone. 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. It holds species of both neighbouring communities along with a few of its own, so the number of species and their density are often higher in it. This crowding at the edge is called the edge effect, and species found only in such a belt are called edge species. A is wrong because the ecosphere means the whole living world of the earth taken together with its environment. B is wrong because ecoboundary is not a term used in ecology. C is wrong because ecotwin is not an ecological term either. Exam tip: tie ecotone to the edge effect, and keep ecotone, a zone, apart from ecocline, a gradual gradient.

The correct answer is D, National Disaster Management Authority. NDMA is the apex body for disaster management in India, created under the Disaster Management Act of 2005 and chaired by the Prime Minister; it frames policies and plans for prevention, mitigation and preparedness. The partner named in the question, The Energy and Resources Institute, is a New Delhi research body founded in 1974 that works on energy, climate and environmental policy, and such early warning systems are typically built by a research institute with the official authority. Option A substitutes Defence for Disaster, which is a different ministry altogether. Option B changes National to Native, a word no Indian statutory body uses. Option C is the most tempting distractor because NDMA does deal with natural disasters, but the first word of its name is National, not Natural. Read the expansion word by word before marking.

The correct answer is C, Azadirachta indica, the neem tree. Neem is native to the Indian subcontinent, so by definition it cannot be an alien species here, however widely it has been planted; a species is alien only outside its natural range. Option A, Lantana camara, is an ornamental shrub from tropical America that now invades dry forests, grasslands and tiger habitat across India. Option B, Mikania micrantha, is the mile-a-minute vine from Central and South America that smothers plantations and natural regeneration in the North East and the Western Ghats. Option D, Prosopis juliflora or vilayati babool, came from Mexico and Central America and has taken over large stretches of arid and semi-arid land, lowering the water table and displacing native thorn scrub. Only neem is Indian in origin.

The correct answer is B, soil. Abiotic components are the non-living parts of an ecosystem, and soil belongs squarely to that list along with sunlight, temperature, water, air, minerals and pH. Soil supplies anchorage, water and nutrients, and its texture and chemistry decide which plants can grow, which in turn decides the animals that live there. Option A, fungi, is biotic: fungi are the chief decomposers that break down dead matter and return nutrients to the soil. Option C, microorganisms, is also biotic, since bacteria, protozoa and other microbes are living organisms acting as decomposers or as agents of disease and nitrogen fixation. Option D, insects, is biotic too, as insects are consumers and pollinators. The trap in such questions is soil, because students link it with living things; keep in mind that soil is a non-living medium even though it teems with life.

The correct answer is C, about minus 196 degrees Celsius, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, at which all metabolic activity in the stored material stops and the germplasm can be kept for very long periods without change. Option A is wrong because minus 20 degrees is the temperature of ordinary long-term seed storage in a gene bank, not of cryopreservation. Option B is wrong because minus 80 degrees is the range of deep freezers used for vaccines and biological samples. Option D is wrong because minus 273 degrees Celsius is close to absolute zero, which laboratory cryopreservation does not use. Remember the pair: minus 20 degrees for seed banks and minus 196 degrees for cryobanks, because examiners place the two figures in the same set of options.

The correct answer is B, Nairobi, Kenya. UNEP was created in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and the decision to place it at Nairobi made it the first major United Nations programme headquartered in a developing country, a point examiners repeat often. Option A, Geneva, is wrong for UNEP although it is right for several bodies that students confuse with it, namely the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization and the CITES secretariat. Option C, Gland, is the home of IUCN, WWF and the Ramsar Convention secretariat, so it is the classic distractor in any question about environmental headquarters. Option D, New York, is the seat of the United Nations Secretariat and the General Assembly, not of UNEP. Fix the pair UNEP and Nairobi firmly, because almost every exam family asks it.

The correct answer is B, glaciers and polar ice. About ninety-seven per cent of the water on earth is salt water in the oceans, and of the small freshwater remainder the greater part is locked up as ice in glaciers and the polar ice sheets, with most of what is left held as groundwater. Option A is wrong because rivers and lakes together hold only a tiny fraction of fresh water, even though they supply most of what people use. Option C is wrong because the atmosphere holds the least of all, a mere trace, which is why it must turn over many times a year to produce the rainfall it does. Option D is wrong because soil moisture is likewise a very small store, important to plants but minute in total volume.

The correct answer is C, gardens. An artificial or man-made ecosystem is one that people create and keep going by their own effort, deciding which species live in it and supplying water, nutrients and protection. A garden is the standard example, along with crop fields, orchards, aquariums and the reservoir behind a dam; left alone, such a system is quickly invaded by other species and loses its planned form. Options A, B and D are natural ecosystems, which develop on their own through succession and are self-regulating and self-sustaining. A forest builds its own canopy, litter and nutrient cycle, while lakes and ponds are natural water bodies whose plants, fish and plankton establish themselves without human planning. Note the distinction examiners test: the artificial ecosystem has low species diversity, is simple in structure and depends on constant human input, whereas a natural ecosystem is diverse, complex and stable by itself.

The correct answer is A, 1948, Fontainebleau, France. IUCN was set up in 1948 at a conference held at Fontainebleau and was then called the International Union for the Protection of Nature; its headquarters later settled at Gland in Switzerland. It is the oldest and largest global environmental network and the only such body whose membership includes both states and non-governmental organisations. Option B gives the birth of WWF, founded in 1961 at Morges in Switzerland, which is a sister organisation sharing the Gland campus, and the two are routinely swapped in objective papers. Option C is the year and city of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which led to the creation of UNEP, not of IUCN. Option D points to the Rio Earth Summit, which produced the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UNFCCC. Learn the sequence 1948, 1961, 1971, 1972 for IUCN, WWF, Greenpeace and UNEP.

The correct answer is C, the ocean ecosystem. Oceans cover close to seventy-one per cent of the earth's surface and hold about ninety-seven per cent of its water, which makes the marine ecosystem the largest on the planet by both area and volume. It runs from sunlit coastal shallows down to deep trenches where no light reaches, and its producers are mainly phytoplankton, whose photosynthesis supplies a very large share of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Option D, forests, form the largest terrestrial ecosystem but cover only about a third of the land surface, which is far less than the oceans. Option B, grasslands, occupy still less and are themselves often a transition between forest and desert. Option A, deserts, are large but have low productivity and sparse life because water is the limiting factor. A useful hierarchy to memorise: ocean, then forest, then grassland, then desert.

The correct answer is C, IUCN. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was begun in 1964 and is the accepted global inventory of the conservation status of plants and animals. It uses nine categories, from Extinct and Extinct in the Wild through Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable to Near Threatened, Least Concern, Data Deficient and Not Evaluated; only the middle three count as threatened. Option A, UNEP, publishes the Global Environment Outlook and the Emissions Gap Report but not the Red List. Option B, WWF, publishes the Living Planet Report with its Living Planet Index, which measures population trends and is the commonest confusion with the Red List. Option D, CITES, is a trade treaty that lists species in three Appendices according to how far trade must be restricted; its listing is a legal instrument, not a measure of extinction risk.