MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 16 of 100

Correct — option (3), 'Only statement A and B are correct'. This question prints THREE statements, labelled with upper-case letters, and two of them stand. Statement A is sound: dumping toxic waste on land destroys biodiversity, and it does so at more than one level. Heavy metals, persistent organic compounds and untreated industrial effluent kill the bacteria, fungi, earthworms and arthropods that make soil a living medium, and once that community is damaged the soil loses structure and fertility; the same contaminants then move through leachate into groundwater and surface water and up the food chain, so the loss is not confined to the dumping ground. Statement B is also sound, and is one of the standard consequences of deforestation. Forest cover slows the arrival of rain at the ground, litter and root systems hold the soil open so that water infiltrates instead of running off, and the roots bind the slope; strip the cover and the same rainfall reaches the stream faster and in greater volume, producing sharper flood peaks, while the eroded soil silts up the river bed downstream and reduces its capacity to carry a flood. Statement C is the one that fails, and it fails on a single clause. Francisco Mendes — the paper prints 'Fransisco' and 'Mendez', and he is universally known as Chico Mendes — was indeed called the Gandhi of the Amazon, but for his defence of the rainforest, not for anything in the energy field. He was a rubber tapper and trade unionist of Acre in Brazil who organised the empates, standing unarmed with his fellow tappers in front of the clearing crews, argued for extractive reserves in which the forest could be used without being felled, and was murdered in December 1988. Two statements stand, one falls, and option (3) is the answer.

• (1)Only statement C is correct — This option keeps only statement C, which is the single statement in the set that does not hold, and discards the two that do. The clause that sinks statement C is 'due to his work in energy field': Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper and union organiser who defended the Amazon rainforest against clearance for cattle ranching and who proposed extractive reserves, and the name Gandhi of the Amazon was given to him for the unarmed, non-violent method of the empates. A candidate who has heard of him at all is likely to recognise the epithet and stop reading there, which is precisely the trap. In a statement that pairs a person with a reason, the reason has to be checked as carefully as the name.
• (2)Only statement A is correct — This option accepts statement A but rejects statement B, and there is no case for rejecting it. That deforestation increases the frequency and severity of river flooding is one of the best-established propositions in environmental science and appears in every treatment of the subject: removing the canopy and root network reduces infiltration and increases surface runoff, so a given rainfall produces a higher and faster flood peak, while the soil washed off the cleared slopes raises the river bed and reduces its channel capacity. A candidate may hesitate over the word 'frequent', wondering whether deforestation can change the number of floods as well as their size, but the higher runoff does convert moderate rainfall events into flooding that forested catchments would have absorbed.
• (4)Statement A, B and C are correct — This option takes all three statements, and it therefore fails on statement C. It is the most attractive wrong answer because the first two statements are so obviously true that a candidate may accept the third by momentum, and because the third contains a real person and a real epithet. The discipline that saves the mark is to read each statement to its end and to treat a compound claim as false if any part of it is false: Chico Mendes really was called the Gandhi of the Amazon, but the reason printed here — work in the energy field — is not the reason, and a wrong reason makes the whole statement wrong. Deliberately attaching a true person to a false field is one of MPSC's most frequent devices.

Three separate environmental ideas are being tested in three lines. The first is soil contamination: soil is not an inert substrate but a living system whose bacteria, fungi and invertebrates drive decomposition and nutrient cycling, and toxic waste dumped on it destroys that community, degrades structure and fertility, and then travels — through leachate to groundwater, through runoff to rivers, and through crops and grazing into food chains. The second is the hydrological role of forests: canopy interception, litter and root channels together slow rainfall's journey to the stream, so a forested catchment releases water gradually while a cleared one delivers it in a rush, and the eroded material silts the channel downstream so that a smaller flood overtops the banks. The third is the history of environmental activism in the Amazon. Chico Mendes led the rubber tappers of Acre against the clearing of forest for cattle ranching, using the empate — a mass non-violent standing-in-the-way — and proposed extractive reserves, land held for sustainable harvesting of rubber and nuts rather than for felling. He was assassinated in December 1988, and the extractive reserve became part of Brazilian law afterwards. It is the non-violent method that earned him the comparison with Gandhi.

MPSC's environment section rewards precision about reasons, not merely about names. The Commission's favourite construction is the compound statement: a true subject joined to a false predicate, or a real person joined to the wrong field of work. Statement C here is the model of it — everything is right except three words. The habit that answers this family of questions is to read each statement to its full stop, then to ask what would have to be true for the whole sentence to hold, and to reject the statement if any element fails. A second point of technique concerns counting: this question prints three statements, not four, and its options quote the upper-case labels A, B and C printed in the English column, while the Marathi column labels the same three statements in Devanagari. Reading the labels from the column you are answering in matters, because the two columns' option texts are not interchangeable. Environmental questions in this paper also draw on international figures and days as much as on Indian material, so a short list of both is worth carrying.

• This question prints only three statements, labelled A, B and C in the English column and in Devanagari in the Marathi column, so its options quote different labels in the two columns.
• Toxic waste dumped on soil kills the bacteria, fungi and invertebrates that make soil a living medium, degrades its structure and fertility, and moves through leachate and runoff into groundwater, rivers and food chains.
• Deforestation raises flood risk by reducing interception and infiltration and increasing surface runoff, and the soil eroded from cleared slopes silts the river bed and reduces its capacity to carry a flood.
• Francisco 'Chico' Mendes was a rubber tapper and union organiser of Acre in Brazil who defended the Amazon rainforest through the empate, a non-violent obstruction of clearing crews, and argued for extractive reserves; he was murdered in December 1988.
• The epithet 'Gandhi of the Amazon' was earned by that non-violent method and by his forest conservation work, not by any work in the energy field, which is the clause that makes statement C false.

• Accepting a statement because the person named in it is real and the epithet is familiar, without checking the reason attached to the name
• Reading only the first clause of a compound statement; if any part of a sentence is false the whole statement is false
• Assuming the statement list has four items when this question prints three, and misreading the options that quote their labels
• Hesitating over statement B because of the word 'frequent', when increased runoff genuinely converts moderate rainfall into flooding that a forested catchment would have absorbed

Environment is one of the sections in which MPSC most often uses the observe-the-following-statements format, and the statements are usually a mixture of textbook propositions and one attribution about a person, a day or an international agreement. The textbook propositions are generally true, so the question reduces to the attribution, and the attribution is generally spoiled in one detail — the wrong field of work, the wrong country, the wrong year. Expect international environmental figures to appear alongside Indian ones, and expect their names to be printed in loose transliteration, as 'Fransisco Mendez' is here for Chico Mendes. A candidate who knows a short roster of such figures with one line each on what they actually did will find these questions among the quickest in the paper.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Chico Mendes, called the Gandhi of the Amazon, is remembered chiefly for organising which form of protest in defence of the rainforest ?

  • (a)Hunger strikes outside government offices
  • (b)The empate, a non-violent standing in the way of clearing crews
  • (c)Litigation before international environmental tribunals
  • (d)Armed resistance by rubber tappers' militias

  Answer(b) The empate, a non-violent standing in the way of clearing crews — Mendes and his fellow rubber tappers of Acre placed themselves unarmed between the forest and the crews clearing it for cattle ranching, and it is this method that earned him the comparison with Gandhi. He also argued for extractive reserves, in which forest is held for sustainable harvesting, and was murdered in December 1988.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Deforestation in a river catchment increases the severity of downstream flooding chiefly through which combination of effects ?

  • (a)Reduced infiltration and increased surface runoff, with siltation of the river bed
  • (b)Increased groundwater recharge and reduced evaporation
  • (c)Higher rainfall and lower atmospheric humidity
  • (d)Reduced river gradient and increased channel capacity

  Answer(a) Reduced infiltration and increased surface runoff, with siltation of the river bed — the canopy, the litter layer and the root network of a forest slow rainfall's arrival at the stream and hold the soil in place. Remove them and the same rainfall reaches the channel faster, while the eroded soil raises the bed and reduces the capacity of the channel to carry a flood.