ibps-so 2019 · Question 212 of 300

While writing up his visit report the o cer had to state the bearing of one of the shops he had called upon from the point at which he nally halted. Point R lies in which one of the following directions with respect to point T?

1. ANorth-west
2. BSouth-west
3. CDue east
4. DNorth-east
5. ESouth-east Directions (Q3–Q12) : The passage that follows is taken from a lecture delivered to an audience of civil servants and bankers upon the reasons for which the loss of species ought to concern institutions that lend against land. Read the passage given below with care and answer the questions that follow it. Certain words have been printed in bold in order to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions. Extinction is among the oldest facts in biology and, stated by itself, among the least alarming. Species have always disappeared, and the fossil record is in the main a record of what is no longer here. What distinguishes the present episode is not the fact of loss but its rate and its cause: the losses now counted run at a pace that no ordinary process accounts for, and nearly every one can be traced to the conversion of habitat by a single species. The accounting is harder than it looks. Most species have never been described, so the denominator of any rate of extinction is a guess; and an extinction is slow to certify, since the absence of a record is not a record of absence. Those who work in the eld therefore rely upon proxies – the shrinking of a range, the breaking up of forest into patches too small to hold a breeding population, the thinning of numbers within a range still nominally occupied. Such measures are imprecise, but they all point the same way, and imperfect instruments that agree are not the same thing as ignorance. The economic argument for conservation is the one most often made and the one least worth leaning upon. It is true that wild organisms have furnished medicines, that pollinators are worth a great deal to agriculture, and that a belt of mangrove is cheaper than a sea wall. But an argument from usefulness invites the reply that the useful parts may be kept and the remainder let go, and it collapses altogether where a species can be shown to be of no use to anybody. The stronger case rests upon insurance: a system with many parts is the likelier to keep working when one of them fails, and we are poor judges in advance of which part will be wanted. Policy has largely followed the logic of the reserve – draw a boundary, shut out what damages, and trust that what lies within will persist. Reserves are necessary and insufficient. They are commonly sited where land is cheap rather than where diversity is richest; they are too small and too far apart for the larger animals; and they do nothing about pressures that cross a boundary without noticing it, such as a shifting climate or a river diverted upstream. The more promising work is being done outside the fence, in the design of farmland that is not wholly hostile to whatever lives in it. None of this argues for despair. Recoveries do occur where the pressure is lifted; the difficulty is not that nobody knows what to do, but that what must be done is dull, local and unfinished.Correct