UPSC STATIC QUIZ – Environment : 4 March 2024

Solution: a)

Only Statement 2 is correct.

The green turtle is one of the largest sea turtles and the only herbivore among the different species. Green turtles are in fact named for the greenish color of their cartilage and fat, not their shells. In the Eastern Pacific, a group of green turtles that have darker shells are called black turtles by the local community. Green turtles are found mainly in tropical and subtropical waters. Like other sea turtles, they migrate long distances between feeding grounds and the beaches from where they hatched.

Solution: c)

Leopard (Panthera Pardus):

The most adaptable of all big cats, they occupy diverse habitats at all altitudes across Africa and Asia. Like black jaguars, melanistic leopards are called black panthers.

Snow leopard (Panthera Uncia):

The ghost of the mountains, this smokey-grey cat lives above the snow line in Central and South Asia. The most elusive of all big cats, it cannot roar, and has the longest tail of them all — which comes in handy for balance while hunting along the cliffs, and also gives warmth when wrapped around the body. The snow leopard is the state animal of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh.

Solution: c)

Statement 1 is incorrect.

In India, the native cheetah species was the Asiatic cheetah, which went extinct in 1952. Currently, only Iran has Asiatic cheetahs in the wild, and the majority of the remaining 7,000-strong population of the big cats around the world is of African cheetahs – the ones that have now come to India.

According to the journal National Geographic, a popular theory on cheetahs’ evolution says they descended from the same ancestor as the American puma, another big cat. This implies cheetahs were not limited to two continents at that point. “About 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, around the end of the last ice age, an extinction event took place that wiped out many large mammal species around the world, including the wild cheetahs of North America and Europe. The extinction of these early cheetah species left only the Asian and African populations of cheetahs”, it says.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is composed of both government and civil society organisations, today cheetahs are mainly present in southern African countries such as Algeria, Botswana, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe, among others.

Earlier, the populations of the Asiatic cheetahs stretched from the Arabian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent.

The Cheetah is assessed as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Under its Red List, which studies and notifies the decline in a species’ population, it comes under the ‘vulnerable’ category meaning it is not very far off from the threat of being extinct in wild.

Solution: d)

What are carbon bombs?

It is “an oil or gas project that will result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over its lifetime.”

Whenever coal, oil, or gas is extracted it results in pollution and environmental degradation. Further, carbon emissions take place in particularly large amounts when fuel is burned.

Net zero emissions means that all carbon emissions into the atmosphere must be absorbed by methods like increasing the forest cover, and decreasing man-made emissions.

Solution: c)

Snow leopard, often referred to as Ghost of the Mountains because of its coat that helps it blend in a snowy-rocky environment.