MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 22 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Universal Encyclopedia'. This is an attribution item rather than a comprehension item: the definition printed in the stem is a standard one, and the commission's key attaches it to the Universal Encyclopedia, so what is being tested is whether the candidate has stored the source alongside the wording. The sentence itself is still worth reading closely, because its structure shows why it reads as the work of a general reference volume rather than of a specialist. Three things are covered at once. 'Conditions agencies and influences' is a deliberately triple formulation — conditions are the states that surround a living thing, such as temperature, moisture, light and salinity; agencies are the things that act, the physical, chemical and biological actors, other organisms and human beings among them; influences are the effects those actors exert. Between them the three words leave nothing external outside the definition. 'The development, growth, life and death' spans the whole biography of a living thing instead of a single stage, which forecloses the narrower idea that the surroundings matter only while an organism is growing. And 'an organism, species or race' names three ascending levels of biological organisation — the individual, the interbreeding population classified as a species, and a subdivision within it — so the claim is asserted at each level and not merely for the individual. Notice equally what the definition does not do: it names no mechanism and lists no components. It does not divide the environment into biotic and abiotic, it does not mention the ecosystem, and it makes no claim about how the influence is transmitted. Comprehensiveness without any technical commitment is the signature of an encyclopaedic entry, and that is a serviceable rule of thumb for this family of questions — a definition built around a technical term such as ecosystem, habitat or niche generally carries a scientist's name, while one that tries to include everything and explain nothing generally comes from a reference work.

• (2)Britanica Encyclopedia — The paper prints the name with a single 'n'; the work meant is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the best known general encyclopaedia in English, and that fame is precisely the trap. When a definition is credited to 'an encyclopaedia', Britannica is the name that surfaces first, and a candidate who is guessing will reach for it. Nothing inside the printed sentence can settle the matter, because two general reference works would define environment in much the same comprehensive register; the option is separable from the answer only by memory of the attribution, which is exactly what the item exists to test. The misspelling is worth a second's notice but no more — MPSC prints foreign names loosely throughout this paper, and recognition has to rest on the work being referred to rather than on the letters actually printed.
• (3)A. C. Tansley — The initials are misprinted: the ecologist is A. G. Tansley — Sir Arthur George Tansley, the British botanist who in 1935 coined the term 'ecosystem' for the whole complex of organisms taken together with the physical factors of their habitat, and who was the first president of the British Ecological Society. This is the most attractive of the three wrong options, because it is the only one attached to a genuine authority on the subject, and a candidate who knows the name will be tempted to credit him with any definition of environment placed in front of him. The content of the stem argues against it. Tansley's contribution was a technical concept, and a definition from him would be expected to name it; the sentence printed here never mentions system, habitat, or the interchange between an organism and its surroundings, which is the substance of his work.
• (4)Jackie Smith — No standard definition of environment in the environmental-studies literature that this syllabus rests on is attributed to this name, and the option carries no supporting detail of any kind — no discipline, no work, no date, nothing that would let a candidate place the person. Options built this way are fillers: they occupy the fourth slot rather than compete for the answer, and a paper that offers two reference works and one real ecologist needs a fourth name of some sort to complete the set. They still deserve a moment's thought rather than reflex dismissal, because an unfamiliar name is occasionally an authority the candidate simply has not met; the discipline is to ask whether the name can be attached to any work at all, and here it cannot be.

Environment, in the sense this syllabus uses, is everything external to an organism that acts upon it. The standard analysis divides it into abiotic components — air, water, soil, light, temperature, and the chemical constitution of each — and biotic components, meaning the plants, animals and micro-organisms with which an organism shares its surroundings, including the competitors, predators and parasites that shape its life most directly. Human activity is often separated out as a third, anthropogenic, component, because its scale and speed make it unlike any other biotic influence. Around this core sit a set of terms that are easy to blur and are asked precisely because they blur: ecology is the study of the relations between organisms and their environment, and the word was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866; the ecosystem, Tansley's term of 1935, is the functional unit in which those relations operate, the community of organisms taken together with the physical setting they exchange matter and energy with; a habitat is the place where an organism lives, while its niche is the functional role it occupies there, so two species can share a habitat but cannot indefinitely share a niche; and the biosphere is the thin zone in which life exists at all, formed where the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere overlap. A definition question of the kind printed here sits at the entrance to all of it, which is why the commission puts one near the head of its environment section.

MPSC's environment section reliably opens with definitional and attribution material before it moves to Acts, conventions and current affairs, and these are among the cheapest marks in the paper because they need no reasoning at all — only that the candidate has read the standard definitions once with their sources attached. The habit that pays is to keep the definitions as pairs rather than as sentences: source on the left, wording on the right, and a note of what makes each wording distinctive. Distinctiveness is what makes recall possible under time pressure, and here it is the triple 'conditions, agencies and influences' with its span from development to death. A second habit this question rewards is not being thrown by the commission's spelling. This paper misprints names throughout — an encyclopaedia with a letter missing, an ecologist's middle initial changed — and a candidate who treats a misspelling as evidence that the option is the wrong one will lose questions where the misspelt option is the keyed one. Read the option for the work or the person it points at, and let the printing be.

• The definition printed in this question is comprehensive rather than technical: it covers conditions, agencies and influences, spans development, growth, life and death, and is asserted at the level of the organism, the species and the race. The commission's key attributes it to the Universal Encyclopedia.
• Environment is conventionally analysed into abiotic components such as air, water, soil, light and temperature and biotic components such as plants, animals and micro-organisms, with human activity frequently treated as a distinct anthropogenic component.
• Sir Arthur George Tansley, a British botanist, coined the term ecosystem in 1935 for the complex of organisms considered together with the physical factors of their habitat; he was also the first president of the British Ecological Society.
• The word ecology was coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 for the study of the relations between organisms and their surroundings; ecology is the discipline, while the ecosystem is the unit it studies.
• Habitat is the place in which an organism lives and niche is the functional role it plays there; the biosphere is the zone of the Earth in which life is found, formed by the overlap of the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere.

• Reaching for the most famous name on offer — Britannica among reference works, Tansley among ecologists — when the question turns on an attribution that has to be remembered rather than reasoned out
• Treating a misspelt option as disqualified, when this paper misprints names freely and the misspelt option is sometimes the keyed one
• Confusing ecology with ecosystem, or habitat with niche, in the definitional questions that cluster around this one
• Assuming an unfamiliar personal name must be the answer because it sounds authoritative, or dismissing it without asking whether any work can be attached to it

Definition-and-attribution questions are a fixed feature of the MPSC environment section and of its geography section too, and they take a small number of shapes. The commonest prints a quoted definition and asks who gave it, as here. A second prints a name and asks what that person is remembered for. A third prints two or three definitions and asks which is correctly paired with its source. All of them are pure recall, none can be reasoned out from the sentence alone, and all of them are answered in seconds by a candidate who has kept a short list of the standard definitions with their sources. The commission also mixes reference works with individuals inside a single option set, which is worth expecting: the answer may be a book rather than a person, and a candidate who scans only for names can talk himself out of the right option.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'ecosystem', for the complex of organisms taken together with the physical factors of their habitat, was coined in 1935 by which of the following ?

  • (a)A. G. Tansley
  • (b)Ernst Haeckel
  • (c)Charles Elton
  • (d)E. P. Odum

  Answer(a) A. G. Tansley — the British botanist Sir Arthur George Tansley introduced the word in 1935 and was the first president of the British Ecological Society. Ernst Haeckel had earlier coined the word ecology, in 1866, for the study of the relations between organisms and their surroundings; Charles Elton is remembered for his work on food chains and animal ecology; and E. P. Odum for the textbook that made ecosystem ecology standard teaching.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The zone of the Earth in which life is found, formed where the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere overlap, is known as which of the following ?

  • (a)Biome
  • (b)Biosphere
  • (c)Ecotone
  • (d)Niche

  Answer(b) Biosphere — it is the life-supporting layer produced by the overlap of the solid earth, the water and the air. A biome is a major regional community of plants and animals such as tropical rain forest or tundra; an ecotone is the transition belt between two adjoining communities; and a niche is the functional role an organism occupies within its habitat rather than any zone of the Earth.