Match List-I with List-II and choose the correct answer using the codes given below the lists :
List-I
A. Planting Hearth
B. Cryophyte Steppe
C. World Floral Regions
D. Puszta Grassland
List-II
1. Hun

Question

Match List-I with List-II and choose the correct answer using the codes given below the lists :
List-I
A. Planting Hearth
B. Cryophyte Steppe
C. World Floral Regions
D. Puszta Grassland
List-II
1. Hungary
2. Adolf Engler
3. C.O. Sauer
4. Arctic Tundra
Codes :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, A-3, B-4, C-2, D-1. Start with the pair you can be certain of. D–1: the Puszta is the Hungarian name for the great treeless grassland plain of the Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain in eastern Hungary. Its classic tract, the Hortobágy, is Hungary's first and largest national park (1973), the largest semi-natural grassland in Europe, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999 — inscribed as a cultural landscape for its four-thousand-year record of pastoralism, its Grey cattle and racka sheep and its mounted csikós herdsmen. Every list of the regional names of the world's temperate grasslands — prairie, pampas, steppe, veld, downs, puszta — puts the puszta in Hungary. Fixing D–1 immediately kills options (c) and (d), which send the puszta to Adolf Engler and to the Arctic tundra respectively. C–2: Adolf Engler (1844–1930), the German botanist and director of the Berlin botanical garden, was the first to draw a world map of the limits of distribution of floras, dividing the earth into four major floral regions or realms; his Syllabus der Pflanzenfamilien (first published 1892, many later editions) set out that division. Later schemes — Ronald Good's six floristic kingdoms (1947) and Armen Takhtajan's thirty-five floristic regions (1978, 1986) — are built on his foundation. B–4: a cryophyte, from the Greek kryos (icy cold) and phyton (plant), is a plant adapted to cold, snow-bound conditions, so a 'cryophyte steppe' is the cold, treeless, low grass-sedge-and-lichen formation of the high latitudes — the Arctic tundra, whose mosses, lichens, sedges and dwarf shrubs over permafrost are the textbook cryophytic community. A–3: the planting hearth belongs with Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975), professor of geography at Berkeley from 1923 to 1957 and the founder of the Berkeley school of cultural geography, whose Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952) is the work behind the idea that farming did not begin everywhere at once but in a small number of 'hearths' from which it spread — the title itself names both the origins and the dispersals. Indian geography syllabi attach the 'planting hearth' — the hearth of vegetative planting, where crops are propagated from tubers, roots and cuttings rather than from seed — to Sauer's scheme. That gives A-3, B-4, C-2, D-1, which is option (b).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the near-miss: it gets C and D right but swaps A and B, making the planting hearth a feature of the Arctic tundra and crediting the cryophyte steppe to C.O. Sauer. Neither survives a second's thought — no hearth of early agriculture lay in the Arctic, which is treeless, frozen for most of the year and beyond the limit of cultivation, and Sauer's name attaches to agricultural origins, not to cold-zone vegetation types.  (c) It gets A and B right but swaps C and D, sending the world floral regions to Hungary and the Puszta grassland to Adolf Engler. A country cannot be the author of a world classification scheme, and the puszta is a place-name for a grassland, not a botanist.  (d) The straight 1-2-3-4 sequence, which matches nothing: it puts the planting hearth in Hungary, credits the cryophyte steppe to Adolf Engler, hands the world floral regions to C.O. Sauer and equates the Puszta grassland with the Arctic tundra. Testing any single pair against it is enough to eliminate it.

Concept: This item is a compressed tour of biogeography: two entries are vegetation formations known by regional names (the puszta of Hungary, the cryophyte steppe of the Arctic), and two are ideas known by the names of the scholars who framed them (Adolf Engler's division of the world into floral regions, and C.O. Sauer's hearths of agricultural origin). The world's temperate grasslands are one biome under many local names — prairie in North America, pampas in Argentina and Uruguay, steppe across Eurasia, veld in South Africa, downs in Australia, canterbury in New Zealand and puszta in Hungary — while phytogeography, the study of how plants are distributed over the earth, divides the world instead into floral kingdoms and regions defined by the plant families endemic to them.

State PCS 2024 Q29 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q29 — Geography PYQ with Answer