Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 8

Namdapha lies in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh, covers about 1,985 square kilometres and is the largest protected area in the Eastern Himalayan sub-region.

Biogas is produced when cattle dung, crop waste and sewage are broken down by bacteria in a closed tank without air, a process called anaerobic digestion.

The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, spread across Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka in the Western Ghats, was designated in 1986 as the first biosphere reserve of India, and in 2000 it also became the first Indian reserve to be included in the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves.

Polythene is a synthetic plastic that bacteria and fungi cannot break down, so it is non-biodegradable. A plastic bag can stay in soil or water for hundreds of years.

The amending Act of 2006 inserted a new chapter into it, creating the National Tiger Conservation Authority and providing for tiger reserves with a critical tiger habitat and a buffer, as well as for the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau.

A johad is a small crescent-shaped earthen dam that villagers build together to catch and store rainwater. It is used mainly in Rajasthan and Haryana, where rain is scarce and falls in only a few months of the year.

Loktak, in Manipur, is the largest freshwater lake of north-east India, and its surface carries phumdis, thick floating mats of vegetation, soil and organic matter that rise and fall with the water level.

A greenhouse gas is one whose molecules absorb the long-wave infrared radiation given off by the warm surface of the Earth and send part of it back, keeping the planet about 33 degrees Celsius warmer than it would otherwise be.

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 Kyoto Protocol, adopted at Kyoto, Japan on 11 December 1997 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was the first treaty to set binding targets for cutting emissions.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization launched the Man and the Biosphere Programme in 1971 as an intergovernmental scientific programme to improve the relationship between people and their environment, and the sites recognised under it form the World Network of Biosphere Reserves.

Parliament passed the Environment (Protection) Act in 1986 and it came into force on 19 November 1986. It was enacted soon after the Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984, when the country needed one general law to fill the gaps left by the earlier pollution laws.

The declaration followed the report of a task force on elephants and was meant to raise the status of the animal in policy and to strengthen the protection of its habitats and corridors.

Lichens are used as bio-indicators of air quality because they are extremely sensitive to sulphur dioxide and other gases in the air.

Both were placed on the Ramsar list in 1981 and were the first Indian wetlands to be so recognised.

Itai-itai disease is long-term cadmium poisoning, first noticed around 1912 in the Toyama region of Japan, where mines upstream released cadmium into the Jinzu river and it built up in the rice and water used by villagers.

MIKE was set up under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. At selected sites, officials record every elephant carcass found and the cause of death in a standard form, so that the share of deaths due to poaching can be tracked and compared between countries and over time.

The core zone is the innermost and the only strictly protected part of a biosphere reserve, usually already notified as a national park or a wildlife sanctuary.

The correct answer is A, Nagarjunsagar Srisailam, which spreads over the Nallamala hills in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and is the largest tiger reserve in the country by area.

Designated in 2008 in Gujarat, it covers the largest area of any biosphere reserve in India, taking in the marine national park and sanctuary of the gulf together with its islands, coral reefs, mangroves and mudflats, which support corals, dugongs, dolphins and large numbers of migratory shorebirds.