Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
CBSE 2026-27: this chapter is not examined (Unit 8 is absent; it is still printed in the NCERT book). UP Board 10 marks, Rajasthan Board 10, MP Board 8. Answers follow the usual word limits: 2 marks up to 30 words, 4 marks up to 80, 6 marks up to 200.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What does the term ‘ecology’ denote?
Answer: Ecology denotes the web of physical and biological systems and processes of which humans are one element.
Q. Define hydrology.
Answer: Hydrology is the science of water and its flows; or the broad structure of water resources in a country or region.
Q. What is deforestation?
Answer: The loss of forest area due to cutting down of trees and/or taking over of the land for other purposes, usually cultivation.
Q. What is a green house, as defined in the glossary?
Answer: A covered structure for protecting plants from extremes of climate, usually from excessive cold; it keeps the inside warmer than the outside (also called a hot house).
Q. What are emissions?
Answer: Waste gases given off by a human-initiated process, usually in the context of industries or vehicles.
Q. What are effluents?
Answer: Waste materials in fluid form produced from industrial processes.
Q. What are aquifers?
Answer: Natural underground formations in the geology of a region where water gets stored.
Q. What is monoculture?
Answer: When the plant life in a locality or region is reduced to a single variety.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Give two examples from the chapter of ecology being modified by human action.
Answer: Deforestation in the upper catchment of a river may make it more flood-prone. Climate change brought about by global warming shows human activity’s widespread impact on nature.
Q. How do the Delhi Ridge forest and Corbett’s chaurs show that the ‘natural’ may be human-made?
Answer: The Ridge forest was planted by the British around 1915 with a South American tree. Corbett’s grassy chaurs were once agricultural fields; villages were relocated.
Q. How do property relations shape the use of natural resources? Give one example.
Answer: They decide how and by whom resources are used. A government owning forests can lease them to timber companies or allow villagers to collect forest produce.
Q. What is meant by the commodification of nature? Give the chapter’s example.
Answer: Turning nature into objects bought and sold for profit. A river’s ecological, utilitarian, spiritual and aesthetic meanings are reduced to profit and loss from selling water.
Q. What is the ‘nature-nurture’ debate? Give the chapter’s example.
Answer: Whether individual characteristics are innate or shaped by environment. Are people poor because they are innately less talented, or because they are born into disadvantage?
Q. What does the chapter mean by ‘risk societies’? Give two examples.
Answer: We use technologies and products that we do not fully grasp. Examples: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Bhopal industrial accident, Mad Cow disease in Europe.
Q. Why is indoor air pollution a serious risk in rural homes?
Answer: Green or poorly burning wood, badly designed chulhas and poor ventilation combine in rural kitchens, putting village women at serious risk because they do the cooking.
Q. Give one benefit and one concern about genetically modified crops from the chapter.
Answer: Benefit: Bacillus thuringiensis genes make cotton resistant to the bollworm. Concern: companies can create sterile seeds, so farmers cannot re-use them and depend on companies.
Q. Why does the chapter call the environment as a public interest ‘a hotly contested arena’?
Answer: Securing the public interest may serve powerful groups or hurt the poor and politically weak, as the debates over large dams and protected areas show.
Q. Name the two key concepts in the Brundtland definition of sustainable development.
Answer: Needs, especially the essential needs of the world’s poor, given overriding priority; and limitations imposed by technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet needs.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the two-way process by which social environments emerge.
Answer: Social environments emerge from the interaction between biophysical ecology and human interventions. Nature shapes society: the fertile Indo-Gangetic floodplain enables intensive agriculture, dense settlement and surplus, giving rise to complex hierarchical societies and states, while the Rajasthan desert supports only pastoralists. Society shapes nature: the social organisation of capitalism has shaped nature worldwide; the private automobile brought air pollution, congestion, wars over oil and global warming. Human interventions can alter environments, often permanently.
Q. How were the ecological effects of the Industrial Revolution in Britain felt across the world?
Answer: Southern North America and the Caribbean became cotton plantations for Lancashire’s mills. Young West Africans were forcibly transported as slave labour; West Africa’s depopulation made its agriculture decline and fields turned to fallow wastelands. In Britain, smoke from coal-burning mills fouled the air, and displaced farmers and labourers lived in wretched conditions in cities. So the cotton industry’s ecological footprints were found all over urban and rural environments.
Q. How do social values shape the relationship between environment and society?
Answer: Capitalist values support the commodification of nature: a river’s ecological, utilitarian, spiritual and aesthetic meanings are reduced to profit and loss from selling water. Socialist values of equality and justice led to seizure of land from large landlords and its redistribution among landless peasants. Religious values lead some groups to protect sacred groves and species, and others to believe they have divine sanction to change the environment to suit their needs.
Q. “Theories and data about environment and society are influenced by the social conditions under which they emerge.” Explain.
Answer: Notions that women are intrinsically less able than men, and Blacks less able than Whites, were challenged as ideas of equality spread during the 18th century’s social and political revolutions. Colonialism generated much knowledge about environment and society, compiling it systematically to make resources available to imperial powers. Geology, geography, botany, zoology, forestry and hydraulic engineering were created and institutionalised to manage natural resources for colonial purposes.
Q. Who was to blame for the Bhopal disaster, according to the Centre for Science and Environment?
Answer: The government ignored warnings: an officer who ordered the company out was transferred; the state Labour Minister called the factory safe; a clearance came weeks before the leak; the Centre ignored siting guidelines. Political links explain this: relatives of politicians and bureaucrats were employed and a donation went to the chief minister’s home town. Union Carbide’s plant was under-designed, lacked an early warning system and evacuation plan, ran at a third of capacity with reduced staff.
Q. What is global warming? What are its likely effects?
Answer: Gases such as carbon dioxide and methane create a ‘greenhouse’ effect by trapping the sun’s heat and not letting it dissipate, causing a small but significant rise in global temperatures. Effects: polar ice-fields melt, the sea level rises, low-lying coastal areas are submerged, the ecological balance is affected, and climates fluctuate more and become uncertain. China and India are increasingly significant contributors to world carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.
Q. What is social ecology? Explain with the chapter’s example.
Answer: Social ecology holds that social relations, especially the organisation of property and production, shape environmental perceptions and practices. A Forest Department maximising revenue by supplying bamboo to the paper industry sees a forest very differently from an artisan making baskets. Such interests generate environmental conflicts, so crises are rooted in social inequality. Solving them needs changed relations between men and women, urban and rural people, landlords and labourers. Murray Bookchin: ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.
Q. Why is environmental management a complex and huge task for society?
Answer: Not enough is known about biophysical processes to predict and control them. Human relations with the environment have become increasingly complex. Industrialisation has expanded and accelerated resource extraction, affecting ecosystems in unprecedented ways. Complex industrial technologies need sophisticated management systems that are often fragile and vulnerable to error. We live in risk societies using technologies and products we do not fully grasp, as Chernobyl, Bhopal and Mad Cow disease in Europe show.
Q. Why did many cotton farmers take their lives, according to P. Sainath?
Answer: Their distress came from a fusion of environmental and economic factors. Exposure to world market fluctuations grew and government support declined under liberalisation. Cotton is high-risk: it needs irrigation and is very prone to pests. Inputs became costlier as depleted water reserves forced deeper drilling and pests resisted pesticides. Farmers borrowed from moneylenders and traders at high interest. When crops failed they could neither repay, feed their families nor arrange children’s marriages.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Why and how does social organisation shape the relationship between the environment and society?
Answer: Property relations: they decide how and by whom natural resources are used. A government owning forests may lease them to timber companies or let villagers collect forest produce; private ownership of land and water decides who else may use them, and on what terms.
Division of labour: ownership and control are tied to the division of labour. Landless labourers and women relate to resources differently from men. Rural women are likely to feel scarcity more acutely because fetching fuel and water is their task, yet they do not control these resources.
Values and norms: capitalist values commodify nature, reducing a river to profit and loss from selling water; socialist values led to land redistribution among landless peasants; religious values lead some to conserve sacred groves and others to claim divine sanction to change the environment.
Knowledge systems: theories reflect social conditions (the nature-nurture debate; equality ideas of the 18th century). Colonialism created disciplines such as geology, botany, forestry and hydraulic engineering to manage resources for imperial powers.
So social organisation influences how different social groups relate to their environment.
Q. Describe the major environmental problems and risks identified in the chapter.
Answer: A. Resource depletion: non-renewable resources are being used up; water and land probably faster than fossil fuels. Groundwater is falling, especially in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh; aquifers are emptied in decades; rivers are dammed and diverted; topsoil is lost to erosion, water-logging, salinisation and brick-making; forests, grasslands and wetlands shrink as agriculture expands, and the tiger population has fallen sharply despite strict laws.
B. Pollution: air pollution from industries, vehicles and burning wood and coal; indoor smoke from chulhas harms village women. WHO: around 7 million deaths in 2012. Water pollution from sewage, effluents and farm runoff; noise from loudspeakers, horns and construction.
C. Global warming: carbon dioxide and methane trap heat; ice-fields melt, sea levels rise, climates grow uncertain.
D. Genetically modified organisms: gene-splicing (Bacillus thuringiensis in cotton against the bollworm); unknown long-term effects; sterile seeds make farmers dependent.
E. Natural and man-made disasters: the Bhopal disaster of 1984 and the tsunami of 2004.
Q. Explain why environmental problems are simultaneously social problems.
Answer: Effects follow inequality: how environmental problems affect different groups is a function of social inequality. Status and power decide how far people can insulate themselves from crises or overcome them.
‘Solutions’ can widen gaps: in Kutch, Gujarat, richer farmers dug deep bore tubewells to grow cash crops; when rains fail, the poorer villagers’ earthen wells run dry and they lack drinking water.
Public interest is contested: reducing air pollution or protecting biodiversity seem universal goals, but how priorities are set and pursued may serve powerful groups or hurt the poor and politically weak, as debates over large dams and protected areas show.
Social ecology: property and production shape perceptions; the Forest Department and the basket-making artisan see the same forest differently, which breeds conflict. Crises are rooted in social inequality, and Bookchin argues that nearly all ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.
Cases: cotton farmers driven to suicide by depleted water, resistant pests and debt (P. Sainath); urban poor evicted from public land for malls and hotels (Amita Baviskar).
So solving environmental problems requires changing relations between social groups.
Q. What is sustainable development? Why does the chapter say it needs a more equal society?
Answer: Definition: the Brundtland Report (1987) defines it as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It has two key concepts: needs, especially the essential needs of the world’s poor, and limitations that technology and social organisation impose on the environment.
Why it is needed: for 300 years development has controlled and ruthlessly exploited nature for a section of the population, causing extinction of thousands of species; non-renewable energy and new species have played havoc with ecology. Future generations will pay the price.
Consumption and inequality: capitalist development rests on consumption; Sunita Narain warns that ‘aspiration is the new God’ and the poor are marginalised. Social stratification lets some sections control most resources.
The way ahead: a society where people are at par, resources are equitably distributed and development is inclusive, not exclusive. The UN’s 193 member states and civil society arrived at 17 Global Goals with 169 targets; Ban Ki Moon: ‘there can be no Plan B, because there is no Planet B’. Gandhi warned that Western-style industrialism by India would strip the world bare like locusts.
5 Data / Graph-Based Questions
(A) 2 marks Which caused more deaths in 2012, indoor or outdoor air pollution? What does the chapter conclude about air pollution as a risk?
Answer: Indoor air pollution (3.3 million against 2.6 million). WHO concluded that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk.
(B) 2 marks Why are village women especially exposed to indoor air pollution?
Answer: They do the cooking, using green or poorly burning wood on badly designed chulhas in poorly ventilated rooms.
(C) 2 marks Name two sources of outdoor air pollution given in the chapter.
Answer: Emissions from industries and vehicles, and the burning of wood and coal for domestic use.