Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 50

The National Board for Wild Life was created by the amendment of 2002 under Section 5A of the Act as the apex advisory body on wildlife, and the Prime Minister chairs it.

The Deccan Peninsula zone covers about forty-two per cent of the country, roughly two-fifths, stretching over the central highlands, Chota Nagpur, the eastern highlands and the Deccan plateau, and it carries most of India sal and teak forests and tiger reserves.

The Trans-Himalaya is the belt lying beyond the Great Himalaya in Ladakh, Lahaul-Spiti and northern Sikkim; it is a cold desert because it stands in the rain shadow of the high ranges, and it is the one Indian zone whose fauna, such as the kiang, wild yak and black-necked crane…

The amendment of 2022 rationalised the schedules of the parent Act: Schedule I now lists animals given the highest protection, Schedule II lists animals with a lesser degree of protection, Schedule III lists specified plants and Schedule IV lists specimens figuring in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade…

That amendment inserted Section 36A for conservation reserves, usually declared on government land next to a national park or sanctuary, and Section 36C for community reserves, declared on private or community land where people volunteer to protect wildlife.

The Russian ecologist G. F. Gause worked with cultures of Paramecium and concluded that when two species need exactly the same limited resource in the same space, one of them is always eliminated in the long run; this is the competitive exclusion principle, also called Gause's principle.

The sundari is a mangrove tree of the tidal deltaic forests of the Coasts biogeographic zone, and the Sundarbans of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta take their name from it; its wood is hard and durable, and like other mangroves it has salt tolerant roots and breathing roots in the waterlogged mud.

The Coastal Regulation Zone notification fixes the landward limit of the regulated belt at 500 metres from the High Tide Line along the sea, and that figure has stayed the same through the notifications of 1991, 2011 and 2019.

The amendment of 1991 inserted Chapter IVA into the Act and created the Central Zoo Authority, which lays down standards for housing and upkeep of animals, recognises or derecognises zoos and regulates the exchange of animals between them.

The Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011 shut the reactors down as designed, but the tsunami that arrived minutes later flooded the emergency diesel generators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Japan's Pacific coast.

The Western Ghats zone includes the hill chain and the Malabar coastal plain, and its wet evergreen forests and high shola grassland mosaic hold a very high share of endemic species, among them the lion-tailed macaque of the rainforest canopy and the Nilgiri tahr of the Eravikulam grasslands.

Founded in 1883, it is India's oldest conservation body, it works from Mumbai, and besides the popular magazine Hornbill it publishes a scientific journal and runs long-running bird and wildlife surveys; Salim Ali, the country's best known ornithologist, was associated with it for decades.

The peacock is the national bird of India and was placed in Schedule I, the group given the highest protection, so it could never be treated as vermin.

Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, roughly four hundredths of one per cent of dry air by volume, yet it is the source of all the carbon that photosynthesis fixes into food and the chief gas by which human activity is warming the planet.

Dachigam National Park near Srinagar, in the Himalaya biogeographic zone, is the last stronghold of the hangul, the Kashmir stag, which is the only surviving race of the red deer group in the Indian subcontinent and the state animal of Jammu and Kashmir.

Iodine-131 has a half-life of roughly eight days, which is why the danger from it after an accident is intense but short-lived, and why potassium iodide tablets are distributed at once so that the thyroid gland is saturated with ordinary iodine and absorbs less of the radioactive form.

Article 252 allows Parliament to legislate on a State subject for two or more States when the legislatures of those States pass resolutions asking it to do so, and the law then applies to those States and to any other State that adopts it later.

The Indian Desert zone has two parts, the sandy Thar of Rajasthan and the salt wastes of Kachchh in Gujarat, and the Indian wild ass or khur survives only in the Little Rann of Kachchh, protected in the Wild Ass Sanctuary.

Section 51 of the Act prescribes this enhanced punishment, along with a fine, for offences against animals given the highest protection, and the amendment of 2022 raised the monetary penalties further.

The Islands zone, made up of the Andaman and Nicobar group and Lakshadweep, accounts for only about 0.03 per cent of the area of India, the smallest share of any zone, yet it holds coral reefs and species found nowhere else, such as the Narcondam hornbill and the Nicobar megapode…