Observe the following statements :
A. There is loss of bio-diversity due to dumping of toxic waste into soil.
B. Deforestation is responsible for frequent floods in river.
C. Fransisco Mendez was know

Question

Observe the following statements :
A. There is loss of bio-diversity due to dumping of toxic waste into soil.
B. Deforestation is responsible for frequent floods in river.
C. Fransisco Mendez was known as 'Amazon Gandhi' due to his work in energy field.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q16 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q16 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer