What are the functions of the environment?
The environment performs the following four dynamic functions:
1. Offer Production Resources: Environment provides us with wide tangible resources like minerals, water and soil. These are the gifts of nature. These resources act as an input for converting natural resources into productive and useful things. In other words, the environment provides input for production that enhances human life qualitatively.
2. Sustains Life: Environment provides us with vital ingredients like sun, soil, water and air that are necessary for the survival of life. Absence of these essential elements implies absence of life. It supports biodiversity.
3. Assimilates Waste: The activities of production and consumption generate waste. This waste in the form of garbage is absorbed by the environment automatically.
4. Enhances Quality of Life: Environment includes surroundings such as rivers, oceans, mountains and deserts. It provides scenic beauty that man admires in life and adds to the quality of human life.
Highlight any two serious adverse environmental consequences of development in India. India’s environmental problems pose a dichotomy — they are poverty induced and, at the same time, due to affluence in living standards — is this true?
Explain the supply-demand reversal of environmental resources.
What happens when the rate of resource extraction exceeds that of their regeneration?
India has abundant natural resources —substantiate the statement.
Give two instances of
(a) Overuse of environmental resources
(b) Misuse of environmental resources.
Is environmental crisis a recent phenomenon? If so, why?
Identify six factors contributing to land degradation in India.
Explain the relevance of intergenerational equity in the definition of sustainable development.
How do the following factors contribute to the environmental crisis in India? What problem do they pose for the government?
(i) Rising population
(ii) Air pollution
(iii) Water contamination
(iv) Affluent consumption standards
(v) Illiteracy
(vi) Industrialisation
(vii) Urbanisation
(viii) Reduction of forest coverage
(ix) Poaching
(x) Global warming
Two major environmental issues facing the world today are ____________ and _____________.
What was the focus of the economic policies pursued by the colonial government in India? What were the impacts of these policies?
What are the two major sources of human capital in a country?
What do you mean by rural development? Bring out the key issues in rural development.
Define a plan?
Who is a worker?
Explain the term ‘infrastructure’.
Why are regional and economic groupings formed?
Why were reforms introduced in India?
Why calorie-based norm is not adequate to identify the poor?
Name some notable economists who estimated India’s per capita income during the colonial period?
Infrastructure contributes to the economic development of a country. Do you agree? Explain.
Why are employment generation programmes important in poverty alleviation in India?
Though the public sector is very essential for industries, many public sector undertakings incur huge losses and are a drain on the economy’s resources. Discuss the usefulness of public sector undertakings in the light of this fact.
Explain the need and type of land reforms implemented in the agriculture sector.
Comment on the growth rate trends witnessed in China and India in the last two decades.
Mention the various indicators of human development.
Explain the Great Leap Forward campaign of China as initiated in 1958.
Mention the salient demographic indicators of China, Pakistan and India.
What are the indicators of educational achievement in a country?
Give reasons for the slow growth and re-emergence of poverty in Pakistan.