Read the following passage. The questions following it are based on its content. Select the best answer to each question, based on the content of the passage.

What is it that people today fail to understand about what is happening to them? What is happening is that they are using up their planet at a fearsome rate and may soon pass the point where their total habitat can sustain human life. Man’s world is slipping away from him. His habits, his thoughts, his actions run counter to the essentials of his existence. He has created national governments for the purpose of giving him maximum protection, but he has no way of protecting himself against the governments. In the act of contending with one another, the governments have become instruments of race suicide and world holocaust. 

Most of what man does is irrelevant to his main problems; his ingenuity has been applied to everything except the need to  make his planet safe for human habitation. He has cut into his natural environment with large slashes. His sources of food are being sealed over by the tar and cement of his cities and highways. Next to destructive force, he produces nothing in greater volume than his garbage. He has made his sky an open sewer and his rivers and lakes a poisonous brew. He has pumped his foul wastes into the seas and has stared balefully at billions of floating dead fish. 

Instead of fortifying his plants against insects with rich loam and compost, he has attacked them indiscriminately with chemicals, violating the chain of life and killing off the birds that are far more essential to his own spirit than many of his commodities. By going against nature, he has warred against beauty of line, movement, and sound. He has been mucking up his own planet, but has the arrogance to go searching for life elsewhere in the universe.

What has been happening to people that they don’t understand is that they have made a geographical entity out of their world without a philosophy for ennobling it, a plan for conserving it, or an organization for sustaining it. Men crave to do good, to act  reasonably and think decently. But goodness and decency and wisdom must have a world purpose in our time if life and thought are to have any meaning at all.