Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 43

The correct answer is A, 2-3 December 1984. The leak at the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal began late on 2 December 1984 and the gas spread through the early hours of 3 December, which is why India observes 2 December as National Pollution Control Day. Option B is wrong because 26 April 1986 is the date of the Chernobyl reactor explosion in the Ukrainian SSR, now marked by the United Nations as International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day. Option C is wrong because 11 March 2011 is the date of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan. Option D is wrong because 10 July 1976 is the date of the dioxin release at Seveso in Italy, the accident behind the European Seveso Directive. Keeping these four dates apart is the whole exercise in this question.

The correct answer is A, methyl isocyanate. Methyl isocyanate, or MIC, was stored at the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal as an intermediate for making the pesticide carbaryl. Water entering a storage tank set off a runaway reaction, and the gas escaped over the surrounding settlements on the night of 2-3 December 1984. Option B is wrong because carbon monoxide is the product of incomplete combustion and was not the agent here, though candidates confuse the two as colourless poisons. Option C is wrong because chlorine, though a notorious industrial gas, was not involved at Bhopal; it is remembered instead from the First World War and from water treatment accidents. Option D is wrong because phosgene, although it is used in making isocyanates and is sometimes listed among the minor constituents, is not the gas named in the tragedy. Examiners test the single name MIC.

The correct answer is B, Nagaland. Zabo, a word that means impounding runoff, is practised around Kikruma village in the Phek district of Nagaland. Rain falling on a protected forest patch at the top of the hill is caught in ponds on the middle terrace, passed through cattle yards where it picks up manure, and then led to paddy fields lower down that also rear fish, so forest, water, livestock and crops are managed as one linked system. Option A is wrong because the harvesting practice of Meghalaya is bamboo drip irrigation, in which split bamboo pipes carry spring water drop by drop to betel vine and black pepper in the Khasi and Jaintia hills. Option C is wrong because Mizoram is known for its bamboo forests and jhum cultivation rather than for a named harvesting system of this kind. Option D is wrong because Manipur is identified in this topic with the Loktak lake and its floating phumdis, not with zabo.

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 C, Ukraine. Reactor Number 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the town of Pripyat, exploded on 26 April 1986. The site then lay in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR and lies in independent Ukraine today, which is why the question is usually framed as present-day country. Option B is wrong, although it is the most tempting distractor: Belarus lay downwind and received a large share of the radioactive fallout, but the plant itself was not on Belarusian soil. Option A is wrong because Russia, though the successor state of the Soviet Union, did not contain Chernobyl; the Soviet-era Kyshtym accident of 1957 at the Mayak plant is the Russian one. Option D is wrong because Kazakhstan is associated with the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, not with Chernobyl.

The correct answer is B, screening, scoping, public consultation, appraisal. Screening comes first and decides whether a Category B project needs a full assessment, making it B1, or does not, making it B2. Scoping follows, at which the appraisal committee issues the Terms of Reference. Public consultation comes third, with a public hearing at the site and written responses. Appraisal is last, when the committee scrutinises the report and the hearing record and recommends a decision. Option A is wrong because scoping cannot precede screening, since screening decides whether an assessment is needed at all. Option C is wrong because a public hearing is impossible before the report exists. Option D is wrong because consultation must follow scoping, as the hearing is held on the draft report prepared against the Terms of Reference.

The correct answer is A, Meghalaya. In the Khasi and Jaintia hills, spring and stream water on a hill slope is tapped and carried through a network of split bamboo pipes, channels and diversion sticks that step the flow down the slope and finally release it drop by drop at the root of each betel vine or pepper plant. The system needs no cement, no pump and no power, and is one of the oldest micro-irrigation methods in the world. Option B is wrong because the traditional work of Kerala in this topic is the surangam, a horizontal tunnel cut into a laterite hill to tap seepage, besides the wooden-cylinder panam keni wells of Wayanad. Option C is wrong because Ladakh is associated with zing, the small tank that collects glacier melt water. Option D is wrong because south Bihar is the home of the ahar-pyne system of channels and embanked reservoirs.

The correct answer is B, 5 million hectares. The Green India Mission is written around two halves of 5 million hectares each: new forest and tree cover on 5 million hectares of land that does not carry forest, and an improvement in the quality of the forest already standing on another 5 million hectares, so the mission's total reach is 10 million hectares. Option A is wrong because 2 million hectares is far smaller than either half. Option C is wrong because 8 million hectares matches neither half nor the total. Option D is a careful trap: 10 million hectares is the combined area of both halves, not the afforestation figure the question asks for. The mission is run by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and it also counts the carbon sink that this cover is expected to create.

The correct answer is B, mercury. The Chisso Corporation discharged methylmercury compounds into Minamata Bay in Kumamoto Prefecture; the mercury accumulated through fish and shellfish into the people who ate them and attacked the central nervous system, producing numbness, loss of coordination, blindness and congenital deformity. The disease gave its name to the Minamata Convention on Mercury, adopted at Kumamoto in 2013. Option A is wrong because cadmium causes Itai-itai disease in the Jinzu river basin of Toyama Prefecture, the standard partner question to this one. Option C is wrong because lead poisoning is called plumbism or saturnism and is linked with paints, pipes and battery work, not with Minamata. Option D is wrong because chronic arsenic poisoning from groundwater is a problem of West Bengal and Bangladesh, where it causes arsenicosis and black-foot disease.

The correct answer is B, Gulf of Mannar. The dugong is a marine mammal that grazes on sea grass, and the sea grass beds of the Gulf of Mannar between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka are its principal habitat in India; the Gulf of Mannar was declared the country's first marine biosphere reserve in 1989 and the dugong is listed in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act. Option A is wrong because the Sundarbans is a mangrove forest identified with the tiger and the estuarine crocodile. Option C is wrong because Gahirmatha is remembered for the olive ridley turtle. Option D is wrong because Bhitarkanika in Odisha is known for the saltwater crocodile and for its mangroves, not for the dugong. Sea grass beds, coral reefs and mangroves are the three habitats a marine protected area guards, and the dugong depends on the first of the three.

The correct answer is B, a diversion channel that carries water from a river. In the old Magadh region of south Bihar the land slopes gently and the soil holds water poorly, so farmers cut long channels, the pynes, from the flood flow of rivers such as the Phalgu, Sakri and Morhar and led the water across the fields. Option A is wrong because the embanked catchment basin at the tail of a pyne is the ahar, a three-sided reservoir whose fourth side is the natural slope; mixing up ahar and pyne is the standard trap in this question. Option C is wrong because the covered underground drinking water tank is the tanka of western Rajasthan. Option D is wrong because the stepped well reaching down to the water table is the baori or vav of Rajasthan and Gujarat, of which Rani ki Vav at Patan is the best known. The ahar-pyne pair therefore works as channel plus reservoir together.

The correct answer is C, every five years. The agreement works on a five-year ambition cycle: parties submit nationally determined contributions, implement them, and then the stocktake assesses where the world stands on mitigation, adaptation and the means of implementation, so that the next round of contributions can be stronger. The first stocktake concluded at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 and found the world off track for the one and a half degree limit. A is the frequency of the Conference of the Parties itself, which is the trap in this question. B matches the biennial transparency reporting cycle more closely than the stocktake. D is the interval of no process under the agreement, and would defeat the purpose of ratcheting ambition. Note that the conference meets yearly while the stocktake arrives only once in five of those meetings.

The correct answer is A, cadmium. Mining waste carrying cadmium entered the Jinzu river in Toyama Prefecture and reached people through irrigated rice and drinking water. Cadmium damages the kidneys and softens bone, so that bones fractured under ordinary use; the Japanese name itai-itai is the cry of pain the sufferers made, and the condition is also described as osteomalacia with osteoporosis. Option B is wrong because excess fluoride causes fluorosis, with mottled teeth and bent limbs, a problem of parts of Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India. Option C is wrong because mercury is the agent of Minamata disease, the other Japanese pollution disease and the commonest confusion in this pair. Option D is wrong because nickel is associated with contact dermatitis and lung effects in refinery work, not with itai-itai. Remember the pair: mercury to Minamata, cadmium to itai-itai.

The correct answer is A, diclofenac, a painkiller widely used on livestock. Vultures that fed on the carcasses of treated animals developed kidney failure and died, and three species of Gyps vulture declined catastrophically within a few years, which is why the veterinary use of the drug was banned in 2006 and meloxicam promoted as a safe substitute. Option B is wrong because oxytocin is misused to increase milk let down and is a cattle welfare issue, not the cause of the vulture crash. Option C is wrong because streptomycin is an antibiotic with no such effect on scavenging birds. Option D is wrong because chloroquine is an antimalarial drug for humans. Conservation breeding centres, including the one at Pinjore in Haryana, now rear vultures for release, and vulture safe zones are maintained around them.

The correct answer is C, Ladakh. In the cold desert of Ladakh there is very little rain, so the water that matters is glacier melt. Guiding channels bring the melt water down from the snout of a glacier to a zing, a small tank near the fields, where it is held until the afternoon when the melt is strong enough to irrigate. A village water official, the churpun, divides the supply among the households. Option A is wrong because the gravity channel of Himachal Pradesh, in the Kangra region, is the kuhl, which carries glacier and stream water straight to terraced fields rather than storing it in a tank; swapping zing and kuhl is the commonest error here. Option B is wrong because Uttarakhand is associated with the guhl channels and the chal-khal ponds of the hills. Option D is wrong because Sikkim has a very heavy rainfall and is not identified with a named melt water tank of this kind.

The correct answer is B, Kuno National Park in the Sheopur area of Madhya Pradesh, where cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa were released from 2022 under the cheetah reintroduction project; the cheetah had been declared extinct in India in 1952. Option A is wrong because Kanha, in the Maikal range, is a tiger reserve best known for saving the hard-ground barasingha. Option C is wrong because Bandhavgarh is a tiger reserve famous for its fort and its high density of tigers. Option D is wrong because Panna is remembered for the successful reintroduction of tigers after the local population was wiped out, which is a different programme often confused with the cheetah project. Kuno had earlier been prepared as a second home for the Asiatic lion of Gir.

The correct answer is B, mercury. The Minamata Convention on Mercury was adopted at Kumamoto, Japan, in 2013 and entered into force in 2017. It is named after the Japanese town whose people were poisoned by industrial methylmercury, and it controls the supply, trade, use and emission of mercury, phasing out mercury mining and many mercury-added products. Option A is wrong because persistent organic pollutants are the subject of the Stockholm Convention of 2001, which covers the so-called dirty dozen chemicals. Option C is wrong because ozone-depleting substances fall under the Vienna Convention of 1985 and the Montreal Protocol of 1987. Option D is wrong because the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes is governed by the Basel Convention of 1989, adopted after rich countries were found dumping waste in poorer ones. Examiners regularly place these four treaties in one matching question.

The correct answer is A, the laterite country of Kasaragod in Kerala. A surangam is a tunnel about two metres high cut nearly level into the side of a laterite hill until it meets a seepage zone; the water that oozes out of the rock trickles along the floor of the tunnel and is collected in a pit outside, so the structure taps groundwater without any pumping. The same idea appears in the thurangam of the adjoining Dakshina Kannada area. Option B is wrong because the Banni grassland of Kutch has virdas, shallow wells dug by Maldhari herders in a depression to reach the thin layer of sweet water lying above the saline water. Option C is wrong because the Tapi basin has the phad system of diversion bandharas. Option D is wrong because Alwar is famous for johads, the small earthen check dams revived by Rajendra Singh and Tarun Bharat Sangh.

The correct answer is B, the United Kingdom. From 5 to 9 December 1952 an anticyclone settled over London, a temperature inversion trapped the smoke and sulphur dioxide of domestic coal fires, and the resulting smog killed thousands. Public outrage produced the British Clean Air Act of 1956, which created smokeless zones and moved households away from raw coal. Option A is wrong because the United States passed its own Clean Air Act in 1963, strengthened in 1970, after episodes such as the Donora smog of 1948 in Pennsylvania and the photochemical smog of Los Angeles. Option C is wrong because Belgium is remembered for the Meuse Valley fog of 1930, an earlier inversion disaster, but not for this law. Option D is wrong because Japan is associated with Yokkaichi asthma and its own Basic Law for Environmental Pollution Control of 1967.

The correct answer is B. In 2019 the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation was merged with the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to create a single Ministry of Jal Shakti, so that irrigation, river basins, groundwater, drinking water supply and sanitation would be handled by one ministry. It works through two departments, the Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, and runs Jal Jeevan Mission, the Jal Shakti Abhiyan and Atal Bhujal Yojana. Option A is wrong because agriculture and rural development remain separate ministries, although watershed work is done under rural development. Option C is wrong because the environment and earth sciences ministries were not merged and deal with forests, pollution and weather services. Option D is wrong because urban water supply reaches cities through the urban affairs ministry but no such merger took place.