Paul J. Crutzen, who often used the term 'Anthropocene' and who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in year 1995, was a citizen of :

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Correct — option (1), The Netherlands. Paul Jozef Crutzen was Dutch. He was born in Amsterdam on 3 December 1933 and remained a citizen of the Netherlands for his whole life, although he spent the greater part of his working career elsewhere. In 1995 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for their work in atmospheric chemistry, and particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone — a body of research that showed how a handful of trace gases released at ground level could destroy the stratospheric ozone layer, and which gave the scientific foundation for the Montreal Protocol. Crutzen's own contribution was to demonstrate that oxides of nitrogen accelerate the breakdown of ozone catalytically, before Molina and Rowland showed that chlorofluorocarbons did the same. He is also the man responsible for the word in the stem. In 2000, with the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer, he proposed the term 'Anthropocene' for a new geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the earth's systems, suggesting the latter part of the eighteenth century as its beginning; the term has since travelled far beyond geology and supplies the title of the very report examined a few questions earlier in this paper. He died on 28 January 2021, in Mainz in Germany, a year before this paper was written. That German connection is the whole difficulty of the question, and it is dealt with in the note on the second option. Two printing points, both reproduced rather than corrected. The English stem ends with a colon while the Marathi stem is a fill-in-the-blank with an underscore rule; and the Marathi column spells the term अँथ्रोपोसिन here while spelling the same word अँथ्रोपोसीन in the earlier question about the Human Development Report. Neither affects the answer, which is option (1).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Germany is the trap the question is built around, and it is a fair one, because Crutzen's professional life really was German. From 1980 he worked in the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, where he remained until his death in 2021, and it was there that most of the work associated with his name was directed and where he died. A candidate who knows where he worked, or who remembers the Max Planck Institute from the Nobel citation, will answer Germany with confidence. But the stem asks what he was a citizen OF, not where he worked, and on that question the answer is fixed by his birth in Amsterdam in 1933 and his Dutch nationality. Scientists are frequently examined on this distinction because so many of them work outside their own countries; read the operative word in the stem — citizen, born, worked, affiliated — before choosing.  (c) France has no connection with Paul Crutzen. It is present as a plausible European alternative for a candidate who knows only that the scientist in question was European and is guessing among the continent's larger countries. What can be said usefully about the option is what it should remind a candidate of: the ozone story is an international one whose principal names are worth attaching to their countries, since the 1995 chemistry prize was shared by a Dutchman, Crutzen, a Mexican, Mario Molina, and an American, F. Sherwood Rowland. That distribution of nationalities is itself a plausible question, and knowing it removes any temptation to guess a country because it sounds scientific.  (d) Poland likewise has nothing to do with Crutzen, and the option functions in the same way as France — a European country offered to absorb the guesses of a candidate who has no recall of the man at all. The distinctive fact that answers the question is small and easy to hold: Crutzen was born in Amsterdam and was Dutch, while his laboratory for the last forty years of his life was in Germany. If the two are stored together as a pair, neither France nor Poland can attract a moment's consideration, and the German option loses its power as well. That is the general form of defence against a nationality question: store the nationality and the place of work together, because the examiner will ask for whichever of the two the candidate is less likely to have.

Concept: Paul Crutzen sits at the junction of two subjects that MPSC examines separately. The first is the depletion of the ozone layer. Ozone in the stratosphere, roughly between fifteen and thirty-five kilometres up, absorbs almost all of the sun's ultraviolet-C and most of its ultraviolet-B radiation, and the discovery in the 1970s that human-made gases could destroy it catalytically was one of the great results of twentieth-century environmental science. Crutzen showed the catalytic role of nitrogen oxides; Molina and Rowland showed in 1974 that chlorofluorocarbons drifting into the stratosphere would release chlorine atoms which would do the same; the three shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995. The Antarctic ozone hole was reported in 1985, the Montreal Protocol was adopted on 16 September 1987, and that date is now observed as the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. The second subject is the Anthropocene, the proposal Crutzen made with Eugene Stoermer in 2000 that human activity has become the dominant force shaping the earth's systems and that this warrants a new epoch in the geological time scale after the Holocene. The term is now standard in policy language — the UNDP's Human Development Report of 2020 is titled 'The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene' — but it has not been formally ratified as a division of geological time. Crutzen's career is therefore a link between the ozone regime, which is generally regarded as the most successful international environmental agreement, and the far harder problem of climate and planetary pressures, for which no comparable success exists.

State PCS 2021 Q93 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q93 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer