Dear Students, we are sharing memory based passage asked in English in today's first slot of IBPS Clerk Prelims Online Examination 2017 in English subject. Must read this passage if you are going to appear in next slot.
Passage was:
When Hurricane Harvey loomed off the coast of my home state
of Texas, it seemed to fill the entire Gulf of Mexico. When it roared on land,
it pummeled the towns of Rockport and Port Aransas, whose tawny beaches I’ve
walked with my kids, pointing out the indigo sails of Portuguese man o’ war
jellyfish. Harvey’s eye took direct aim at the University of Texas’ Marine
Science Institute, flattening not just the facility itself, but priceless
samples awaiting analysis.
After Harvey left Port Aransas, it spun back into the Gulf
of Mexico over record sea temperatures as great as 4 degrees Fahrenheit above
normal. Thermodynamic laws require that warmer air holds more water vapor. The
heat armed the storm with a mighty arsenal of water vapor.
Then Harvey returned to land, dumping a catastrophic amount
of rain on Houston. My Facebook feed filled with pleas for rescue from the
rising waters. Friends’ houses flooded — houses that had always been on dry
land before. A chemical plant blew up, twice. Toxic chemicals oozed from
Superfund sites. Dozens died in the deluge, mostly by drowning.And all the while, alongside the heartbreak and horror, I
kept thinking about a strange harbinger: jellyfish.
Diaphanous in form yet menacing in the sting, jellyfish have
a powerful capacity to capture our imagination. They undulate in a primal
rhythm, blinking open and closed like eyes that can peer into the soul of the
sea. And what they are seeing are changes produced by us here on land.
Because we burn fossil fuels, which release greenhouse
gasses, not just the atmosphere but ocean waters are warming. At the same time,
our ship traffic transports animals to new places, and sometimes these exotics
find home-like conditions where in the past those conditions would have been
unsuitable.
That’s what happened in the eastern Mediterranean, where a
jellyfish from the tropical Indian Ocean has found warm, homey waters and now
forms huge aggregations called blooms that stretch for tens of miles every
summer. The fierce stings of these animals chase beach-goers out of the water.
Their gooey bodies clog machinery at power plants, halting operations.
Rampant coastal development provides new habitat for a
jellyfish stage called a polyp that looks like a sea anemone. When it finds a
hard surface like a dock or a jetty to grow on, a single polyp can proliferate
into a dozen or even more medusae. And fields of polyps grow on those hard
structures.
That’s likely what happened off the coast of Italy, where
gas platforms are thought to be the home for a new invasion of jellyfish. In
the twentieth century in the Adriatic Sea, moon jellies, pinkish with their
characteristic four-leafed clover on top, were a rarity. Now they are
ubiquitous. And as we wash pollution into our waters, we create
low-oxygen environments. Some jellyfish, with their low metabolic rate due to
their a-cellular jelly insides, can survive more easily there than fish, with
their oxygen-guzzling muscled tissues.
That is part of what happened in the Yellow Sea, where
pollution is unchecked. It is the birthplace of a maroon jellyfish that reaches
a weight of 500 pounds. Blooms of the creature were a once-a-generation event
before 2000 — the kind of thing fishermen mentioned to their sons. But
jellyzillas swept from China in the Tsushima Current, have plagued Japan’s
coast almost every year of the 21st century. In 2009, a fishing boat caught so
many that their weight capsized the vessel. (Fortunately, the crewmembers were
rescued.)
And our lack of oversight of the fishing industry, which has
removed more than 90% of the large fish from the seas, has depleted the
predators of jellyfish as well as their competitors. Jellyfish are eaten by
some fish, and jellyfish eat the same small zooplankton that fish do. The
ecological vacuum left by unrestrained fishing can allow jellyfish to expand
their influence in marine ecosystems.
That’s what happened off the coast of Namibia, once one of
the world’s most productive fisheries. Prior to 1960s, the rich Benguela
current nourished a yield of a million tons of fish annually, until a fishing
free-for-all depleted the ecosystem. Today, Namibian waters contain three times
more jellyfish than fish by weight. There are reports of seabirds and seals
starving.
While researching jellyfish for the last six years, I’ve
grown to understand that in the places where these large, pervasive jellyfish
blooms occur, our oceans’ systems are out of whack. The blooms are a call for
us to become better stewards of our oceans.
There’s a real disconnect between us on land and what
happens in the ocean. We are ultimately terrestrial creatures. It’s easy to
ignore a power plant clog in the Mediterranean, a marine ecosystem disrupted in
Japan, a fishing industry lost in Namibia. There seem to be more pressing
things closer at hand.
But this summer proved that disconnect is dangerous.
Hurricane Harvey was even more evidence that what the jellyfish are telling us
about the damaged oceans is not just a warning about an off-in-the-future time
or a place somewhere else. This is not a vague the-world-is-all-connected idea.
Harvey is a tangible, physical cost of our disregard. The health of the ocean
is our health too.
Note: Questions were based on this passage.
All the Best for the Next Slot Aspirants!
0 Comments