Match the correct pairs :
Country
(a) India
(b) Ecuador
(c) U.S.A.
(d) Australia
National Park
(i) Jim Corbett
(ii) Grand Canyon
(iii) Galapagos
(iv) Great barrier reef

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), '(a) - (i), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (iv)'. Each of the four protected areas printed in the second column is inseparable from one country, so the matching can be done from geography alone. India, statement (a), goes with (i) Jim Corbett: the park in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, established in 1936 as Hailey National Park and therefore the oldest national park in India, renamed after the hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett in 1957, and the place where Project Tiger was launched in 1973. Ecuador, statement (b), goes with (iii) Galapagos: the volcanic archipelago lying roughly a thousand kilometres out in the Pacific from the South American mainland, Ecuadorian territory, made a national park in 1959, and famous as the islands whose finches, tortoises and mockingbirds Charles Darwin observed during the voyage of the Beagle. U.S.A., statement (c), goes with (ii) Grand Canyon: the gorge cut by the Colorado River across northern Arizona, protected as a national park in 1919. Australia, statement (d), goes with (iv) Great barrier reef: the world's largest coral reef system, stretching along the Queensland coast in the Coral Sea and managed as a marine park since 1975. That is exactly the set of pairings in option (3). Because all four are so strongly identified with their countries, the question is really a check on whether a candidate reads the printed columns as an answer — the left column and the right column are printed side by side purely as layout, and their adjacency on the page asserts no pairing at all. Anyone who assumes row-by-row correspondence will be led to option (1), which is wrong.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the pairing you get by simply reading the two printed columns straight across, and it is the trap the format is built around. It happens to be right about India and Jim Corbett and about Australia and the Great Barrier Reef, but it gives Ecuador the Grand Canyon and the United States the Galapagos — an exact transposition of the middle two. The Grand Canyon is the gorge of the Colorado River in Arizona and the Galapagos are Ecuadorian islands in the Pacific, so the two cannot be exchanged.  (b) This option is right about Ecuador and the Galapagos and about the United States and the Grand Canyon, but it swaps the outer pair, putting the Great Barrier Reef in India and Jim Corbett in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef lies in the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast and India has no coral system remotely comparable in scale, while Jim Corbett National Park is in Uttarakhand. A candidate who verifies the two middle pairings, finds them correct and stops reading will select this option.  (d) Every pairing in this option is wrong: the Galapagos are given to India, Jim Corbett to Ecuador, the Great Barrier Reef to the United States and the Grand Canyon to Australia. It is the option produced by shifting the whole right-hand column by two places, and it is detectable without any specialist knowledge because each of the four protected areas is named after a feature or person unmistakably tied to its own country. In matching questions it is always worth scanning for the option in which nothing lines up, since eliminating it costs no time.

Concept: The four sites in this question represent four different kinds of protected area, which is part of why they are examined together. Jim Corbett is a terrestrial wildlife park created for a large mammal, and its history traces the arc of Indian conservation from colonial game protection in 1936 through the tiger crisis of the early 1970s to Project Tiger in 1973. The Galapagos is an island ecosystem protected primarily for endemism — species found nowhere else, isolated by ocean, and central to the theory of evolution by natural selection. The Grand Canyon is a geological and landscape protection, a mile-deep section through nearly two billion years of rock cut by the Colorado River. The Great Barrier Reef is a marine protected area, the largest structure on earth built by living organisms, and now the most-watched indicator of ocean warming and coral bleaching. Between them they cover terrestrial, island, geological and marine conservation, which is the syllabus's whole range in four names.

State PCS 2024 Q18 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q18 — Geography PYQ with Answer