CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 28 of 120

Correct — A, Biotic and abiotic. This is a definitional item, and all four options are real classifications of resources — they simply answer four different questions. NCERT's Class 10 chapter on resources and development sets them out in a single list: on the basis of origin, biotic and abiotic; on the basis of exhaustibility, renewable and non-renewable; on the basis of ownership, individual, community, national and international; and on the basis of the status of development, potential, developed stock and reserves. Origin asks where the resource came from. Anything obtained from the biosphere and having life in it — forests, wildlife, fisheries, livestock, and the fossil fuels that formed from once-living matter — is biotic. Anything composed of non-living things — rock, minerals, metals, land, water in itself — is abiotic. The other three options describe exhaustibility, ownership and the stage of development respectively, so each is correct about something the question did not ask.

• (b)Renewable and non-renewable — That is the classification on the basis of exhaustibility, not origin. It asks whether a resource replenishes itself in human time — solar and wind energy against coal and petroleum — which is a question about rate of renewal, not about ancestry.
• (c)Individual and community — This is the ownership axis, and it is also incomplete as printed: the full set is individual, community, national and international resources. Ownership is about who holds the right to use a resource, not about where it came from.
• (d)Potential and reserve — This belongs to the status-of-development axis, whose members are potential, developed stock and reserves. It measures how far a resource has been surveyed, made usable and put to work — again, not its origin.

A resource is anything in the environment that can be used to satisfy a need, is technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally acceptable. Because the same substance can be sorted in several ways, geography classifies resources along four independent axes: origin (biotic or abiotic), exhaustibility (renewable or non-renewable), ownership (individual, community, national, international) and status of development (potential, developed stock, reserves). A single resource carries a label on every axis at once — a forest is biotic, renewable, often community or national, and may be a developed resource or still only potential.

The question is easy to get wrong at speed because every option is a true classification. The discipline it wants is to read the criterion in the stem — 'on the basis of their origin' — and match only that. A useful memory hook is that origin is a question about parentage: did it come from something that was alive, or from something that never was. Coal and petroleum are the standard catch here; they are non-renewable on the exhaustibility axis but biotic on the origin axis, because they formed from buried organic remains. Note also that option (c) prints only two of the four ownership categories, which is a further reason it cannot be the intended answer even for the axis it belongs to.

• NCERT lists the four axes together: '(a) On the basis of origin - biotic and abiotic (b) On the basis of exhaustibility - renewable and non-renewable (c) On the basis of ownership - individual, community, national and international (d) On the basis of status of development - potential, developed stock and reserves.'
• Biotic resources are obtained from the biosphere and have life in them — flora, fauna, fisheries, livestock, and fossil fuels derived from decayed organic matter.
• Abiotic resources are composed of non-living things — rocks, minerals, metals and land.
• Potential resources exist in a region but have not yet been used; reserves are the part of the known stock that present technology can actually tap.
• The origin and exhaustibility axes cut across each other: coal is biotic in origin yet non-renewable in exhaustibility.

• Picking renewable and non-renewable because it is the most familiar pair; that axis is exhaustibility, not origin.
• Assuming fossil fuels must be abiotic because they are dug out of rock — they are biotic in origin, having formed from once-living matter.
• Accepting 'individual and community' as the ownership answer; the full ownership set also includes national and international resources.

As a criterion-to-category match — the stem names one basis of classification and the options supply the category pairs from all four.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  On the basis of the status of development, resources are classified as which one of the following?

  • (a)Biotic and abiotic
  • (b)Renewable and non-renewable
  • (c)Potential, developed stock and reserves
  • (d)Individual, community, national and international

  Answer(c) Potential, developed stock and reserves — this axis measures how far a resource has been surveyed, made technologically usable and actually put to work.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Coal is best described as which one of the following combinations?

  • (a)Abiotic in origin and renewable
  • (b)Biotic in origin and non-renewable
  • (c)Abiotic in origin and non-renewable
  • (d)Biotic in origin and renewable

  Answer(b) Biotic in origin and non-renewable — coal formed from buried plant remains, which makes it biotic by origin, but it cannot be replenished on any human timescale.