Communities have been involved in the protection of plants and animals for the…
2024
Communities have been involved in the protection of plants and animals for the last ______.
Answer: A. Several thousand years — Concept In a passage-based question the answer is fixed by what the passage itself states, so the work is to locate the sentence that carries the required…
- A.
Several thousand years
- B.
200 years only
- C.
60 years only
- D.
only recently
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
Concept
In a passage-based question the answer is fixed by what the passage itself states, so the work is to locate the sentence that carries the required information and then read its wording literally. Time words are scale markers of different orders of magnitude: a millennium is a unit of 1,000 years, a century is a unit of 100 years and a decade is a unit of 10 years, so millennia, centuries and decades point to thousands, hundreds and tens of years respectively. A relative expression such as "recently" carries no measured length at all.
Application
The stem asks how long communities have been involved in protecting plants and animals, so scan the passage for the sentence whose subject is communities and whose action is protection.
That sentence reads: "For millennia, communities have attempted to protect animals and plants for practical and spiritual reasons."
"Millennia" is the plural of millennium, and one millennium is 1,000 years; the plural therefore fixes the span at several thousand years.
Reading it back into the stem gives: communities have been involved in this protection for the last several thousand years.
Cross-check
The passage carries three other time markers, and each is attached to a different subject, so none of them can be transferred to the community practice:
"for around two centuries or so" names the period in which an anthropocentric view of the world created an ecological discord and utilitarian ideas gave even conservation a strictly commercial purpose.
"about six decades old" is the age the passage gives to modern environmental consciousness, a movement it treats as far younger than the community tradition.
"the late 19th century" and "much later" date the founding of bodies such as the Bombay Natural History Society and the mainstreaming of ecology through pioneers like Salim Ali and M Krishnan.
Result: the passage places the community protection of plants and animals over several thousand years.