Plants and animals that live on land are called :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Terrestrial habitants. A habitat is simply the surroundings in which an organism lives, and school science divides habitats into two broad kinds by the medium the organism lives in: terrestrial habitats, which are on land — forests, grasslands, deserts, coastal strips, mountains — and aquatic habitats, which are in water — ponds, lakes, rivers, swamps, estuaries and oceans. 'Terrestrial' comes from the Latin terra, earth or land. So plants and animals that live on land are the terrestrial ones: a mango tree, a cactus, a camel, a deer, an elephant, an earthworm. That is exactly what the question asks and (c) is the marked answer. The reason this item is not as trivial as it looks is option (d). Plants and animals ARE biotic — 'biotic' is the correct word for the living components of any habitat, as against the abiotic or non-living components. But 'biotic' tells you nothing about land or water: a fish in a river is every bit as biotic as a banyan tree on a hill. The question supplies one specific piece of information — 'live on land' — and the only option that uses that information is 'terrestrial'. Whenever an option is true of the subject but ignores the distinguishing detail the question gives you, it is a distractor, not the answer. Choose the option that discriminates.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Abiotic names the NON-LIVING part of a habitat — air, water, soil, sunlight, temperature, minerals. Plants and animals are living organisms by definition, so they can never be abiotic. This option is the exact opposite of what the question describes and is included only because 'abiotic' and 'biotic' look and sound alike under exam pressure.  (b) Aquatic is the complementary category: organisms that live IN WATER — fish, whales, dolphins, octopus, water hyacinth, hydrilla, lotus. The word is built on Latin aqua, water. The question says 'live on land', which is the other half of the same pair, so aquatic is precisely wrong rather than merely irrelevant.  (d) Half-true, and therefore the strongest distractor in the set. Plants and animals are indeed the biotic (living) components of a habitat — that is standard terminology. But biotic is defined against abiotic, i.e. living versus non-living; it does not distinguish land from water. Since the question specifies 'on land', the discriminating term is terrestrial. A student who stops at 'plants and animals are living, so biotic' has answered a question that was not asked.

Concept: A habitat is the place with its particular surroundings where an organism lives — where it finds food, shelter, protection and a place to breed. Habitats are classified first by medium into terrestrial (on land) and aquatic (in water), and then into finer types: terrestrial habitats include forests, grasslands, deserts, mountains and coastal regions, while aquatic habitats include freshwater bodies (ponds, lakes, rivers, streams) and marine ones (seas and oceans), with estuaries and marshes in between. Cutting across this classification is a second, entirely different axis: every habitat has biotic components (plants, animals, microorganisms) and abiotic components (air, water, soil, light, temperature). The examiner's whole design here is to see whether a candidate can keep the two axes apart.

State PCS 2024 Q62 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q62 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer