Match List – I with List – II and select the correct answer from the code given below the lists.
List – I (Bio-reserve Sector)
A. Manas
B. Sundarbans
C. Nanda Devi
D. Pachmarhi
List – II (State)
1. Ma

Question

Match List – I with List – II and select the correct answer from the code given below the lists.
List – I (Bio-reserve Sector)
A. Manas
B. Sundarbans
C. Nanda Devi
D. Pachmarhi
List – II (State)
1. Madhya Pradesh
2. Uttar Pradesh
3. Assam
4. West Bengal
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, A-3, B-4, C-2, D-1. Three of the four pairs are straightforward and true on any map: Manas Biosphere Reserve lies in Assam, on the Bhutan border along the Manas river (A-3); the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve is the Indian part of the Ganga–Brahmaputra delta in West Bengal (B-4); and the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve occupies the Satpura range in Madhya Pradesh (D-1). The fourth pair, Nanda Devi–Uttar Pradesh (C-2), is the one that has to be read carefully, and it is the reason the code works out to (b). Nanda Devi is today in Chamoli district of UTTARAKHAND, not Uttar Pradesh — but List-II offers no Uttarakhand at all, and that omission is the signal. The question is drawn on the PRE-2000 map of India: Nanda Devi National Park was established in 1982 in what was then Uttar Pradesh, the biosphere reserve around it was notified in 1988 on the same territory, and Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh only on 9 November 2000 by the Uttar Pradesh Reorganisation Act (as Uttaranchal, renamed Uttarakhand in 2007). So the commission's key is defensible on the map the question implies, but a student answering from today's political geography would say Uttarakhand — and would be right about where the peak stands. Note the difference from UPPSC's own 2021 paper, which set the same reserve and matched it to Uttarakhand.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the closest trap and differs from the key only in the first two pairs, which it swaps: it sends Manas to West Bengal and the Sundarbans to Assam. Manas is an Assam reserve — it sits against the Bhutan frontier in the Himalayan foothills and takes its name from the Manas river — while the Sundarbans mangrove delta lies at the seaward edge of West Bengal. Nanda Devi and Pachmarhi are placed as in the key, so a candidate who checks only the last two pairs will pick this by mistake.  (c) Not one pair survives. It puts Manas in Uttar Pradesh, the Sundarbans in Madhya Pradesh, Nanda Devi in Assam and Pachmarhi in West Bengal. Two of these are impossible on physical grounds alone: the Sundarbans is a coastal mangrove delta and Madhya Pradesh is landlocked, and Nanda Devi is a 7,800-metre Himalayan peak while Assam is a lowland valley State.  (d) This is the unshuffled 1-2-3-4 code that a guessing candidate falls back on, and it fails on every pair — Manas to Madhya Pradesh, the Sundarbans to Uttar Pradesh, Nanda Devi to Assam and Pachmarhi to West Bengal. The Sundarbans in Uttar Pradesh, a State with no coast at all, is enough on its own to strike it out.

Concept: A biosphere reserve is not a legal category of protected area in the way a national park or a wildlife sanctuary is. It is a designation under UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme, notified by the Government of India over a large landscape that is zoned into a strictly protected core, a buffer where limited research and tourism are allowed, and a transition area where communities live and work. That is why a biosphere reserve usually contains one or more national parks inside it and is much larger than them — the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, for instance, encloses both the Nanda Devi National Park and the Valley of Flowers National Park. India has notified eighteen biosphere reserves; a subset of them, including Nanda Devi, Manas, Sundarbans and Nokrek, are also on UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves.

State PCS 2022 Q41 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q41 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer