Instructions

Study the passages below and answer the questions that follow each passage?

Passage-IV

One major obstacle in the struggle to lower carbon dioxide emissions, which are believed to play a role in climate change, is the destruction of tropical rain forests. Trees naturally store more carbon dioxide as they age, and the trees of the tropical rain forests in the Amazon, for example, store an average of 500 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare (10,000 square miles). When such trees are harvested, they release their carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This release of carbon dioxide through the destruction of tropical forests, which experts estimate accounts for 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually, traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere, which leads to global warming.
The Kyoto treaty set forth a possible measure to curtail the rate of deforestation. In the treaty, companies that exceed their carbon dioxide emission limits are permitted to buy the right to pollute by funding reforestation projects in tropical rain forests. Since forests absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, planting such forests helps reduce the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus balancing out the companies’ surplus of carbon dioxide emissions. However, attempts at reforestation have so far been unable to keep up with the alarming rate of deforestation, and it has become increasingly clear that further steps must be taken to curtail deforestation and its possible deleterious effects on the global environment.
One possible solution is to offer incentives for governments to protect their forests. While this solution could lead to a drastic reduction in the levels of carbon dioxide, such incentives would need to be tied to some form of verification, which is extremely difficult, since most of the world’s tropical forests are in remote areas, like Brazil’s Amazon basin or the island of New Guinea, which makes on-site verification logistically difficult. Furthermore, heavy cloud cover and frequent heavy rain make conventional satellite monitoring difficult.
Recently, scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have suggested that the rates of deforestation could be monitored using new technology to analyze radar waves emitted from a surveillance satellite. By analyzing multiple radar microwaves sent by a satellite, scientists are able to prepare a detailed, high resolution map of remote tropical forests. Unlike photographic satellite images, radar images can be measured at night and during days of heavy cloud cover and bad weather.
Nevertheless, critics of government incentives argue that radar monitoring has been employed in the past with little success, citing the Global Rain Forest Mapping Project which was instituted in the mid 1990s amid concern over rapid deforestation in the Amazon. However, the limited data of the Mapping Project was due only to the small amount of data that could be sent from the satellite. Modern satellites can send and receive 10 times more data than their predecessors of the mid 1990s, obviating past problems with radar monitoring. Furthermore, recent technological advances in satellite radar that allow for more accurate measurements to be made, even in remote areas, make such technology a promising step in monitoring and controlling global climate change.

Question 38

It can be inferred from the passage that photographic satellite images


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