Global climate change pundits have for long been blowing heat and cold over…

20232024

Global climate change pundits have for long been blowing heat and cold over melting ice caps, rising ocean levels and unusually hot summers on the one hand and receding deserts, shrinking biodiversity and colder winters on the other. Climatologists are, however, unanimous in their opinion that regional variation notwithstanding, the earth as a whole is becoming warmer - and largely due to increased human activity. And yet, as a continent Antarctica would seem to be bucking the trend. Recent reports quoting American scientists from the south pole say that while temperatures in every other continent have risen over the past century, Antarctica has become appreciably colder over the past 35 years and continues to cool, becoming the only one of Earth's seven continents to react differently to global warming. The world's average temperature over the last 100 years has risen by 0.06c a decade and the average actually went up to 0.19c between 1979 and 1998. In the Antarctic, on the other hand, temperatures fell on an average by 0.7c a decade. Traditional theories of climate change have held that the effects of global warming ought to be magnified at the poles.

Nonetheless, recent research points out that while the Arctic is indeed getting warmer, the Antarctic is definitely getting cooler. This will mean that previous estimates of rising sea levels that included the melting ice caps of both the north and south poles will have to be suitably revised. So what is the mystery behind the cooling of the white continent? Since most of the inhabited and industrialized countries are clustered close to the Arctic, polluting emissions waft across to the north pole, creating a greenhouse effect, warming the air and loosening the ice sheets. The complex interplay of ocean currents appears to have changed temperatures cooling the southern ocean around the Antarctic and transforming the pole’s temperature profile. Antarctica’s harsh desert valleys are turning cooler, setting off a series of ecological consequences in the region. Meanwhile, here's another contradiction: reports from new Zealand describe how there is a surfeit of global warming-induced break-away icebergs in the southern hemisphere.

According to the passage, factors affecting temperature profile of the Arctic do not include

  1. A.

    ocean currents

  2. B.

    loosening of the ice sheets

  3. C.

    greenhouse effects

  4. D.

    Global warming

Attempted by 1 students.

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A

In an “except/does not include” comprehension question, an option counts as one of the named subject's factors whenever the passage places it inside that subject's own causal chain — even if, within that chain, it is itself a downstream link rather than the original trigger. An option counts as excluded only when the passage places it inside a DIFFERENT subject's account instead.

  1. The passage lays out ONE unbroken chain for the Arctic: pollution clusters near it, this creates a greenhouse effect, that warms the air, and that in turn loosens the ice sheets — so greenhouse effect and the loosening of the ice sheets both sit inside the Arctic's own chain, even though ice-sheet loosening is the chain's downstream result rather than its trigger.

  2. The passage also states plainly that “the Arctic is indeed getting warmer,” confirming general warming as an Arctic factor too.

  3. The one remaining option, ocean currents, never appears in that Arctic chain at all — the passage instead places it inside a separate, self-contained sentence about cooling the southern ocean around Antarctica, a different pole entirely.

Cross-check against the sentence boundary itself: the Arctic's chain (emissions → greenhouse effect → warmer air → looser ice sheets) sits in one sentence, and the Antarctic's ocean-current account sits in the very next, separate sentence — confirming ocean currents belong only to the Antarctic side, while the other three options are all named within the Arctic's own sentence.

So the factor the passage does NOT include among those affecting the Arctic's temperature profile is ocean currents.

Explore the full course: Accenture Preparation