Foundation practice questions.

In a systems model of an environmental value system (EVS), which of the following is best classified as an input?

• A decision to install solar panels on a house
• A choice to join a campaign against a new airport
• A school lesson on the causes of ocean acidification
• A letter written to a newspaper about local air quality

Answer: A school lesson on the causes of ocean acidification

An EVS is modelled as a system: education, cultural and religious teaching, media coverage and personal experience are the inputs, while the perspectives, decisions and actions that come out of it are the outputs. Installing panels, campaigning and writing letters are all behavioural outputs, not inputs.

A community rejects a road scheme through a wetland, arguing that the wetland has worth in its own right whatever use people make of it. This position is best described as

• ecocentric
• anthropocentric
• technocentric
• cornucopian

Answer: ecocentric

Valuing nature independently of any benefit to people is the defining feature of an ecocentric perspective. An anthropocentric argument would have weighed human costs and benefits, and a technocentric one would have looked for an engineered way of building the road anyway.

A coastal city responds to falling wild fish catches by funding large offshore fish farms and a desalination-powered hatchery. This response is most characteristic of which environmental value system?

• Ecocentric
• Deep ecologist
• Anthropocentric
• Technocentric

Answer: Technocentric

Technocentrics answer resource problems with technology and research rather than with restraint in consumption. An ecocentric response would have cut fishing effort, and a purely anthropocentric response would have weighed the costs and benefits to people before choosing any option.

Which pairing of an environmental value system with a typical policy preference is correct?

• Ecocentric - expanding nuclear power to meet rising demand
• Anthropocentric - regulating emissions by taxes and quotas
• Technocentric - reducing consumption and living self-sufficiently
• Cornucopian - protecting wilderness for its own sake

Answer: Anthropocentric - regulating emissions by taxes and quotas

Environmental managers sit in the anthropocentric middle of the spectrum: they accept development but manage it through regulation, taxation and quotas. Students often mislabel regulation as technocentric, but technocentrics look to new technology, not to legal limits on behaviour.

Which statement about environmental value systems is correct?

• An individual's EVS is fixed at birth and does not change
• People given identical environmental data will reach the same conclusion
• The same person may hold different positions on different issues
• Scientific evidence removes any need to consider perspectives

Answer: The same person may hold different positions on different issues

An EVS is a system with changing inputs, so a person can be ecocentric about a local wood and technocentric about energy supply, and their position can shift as new information arrives. Data alone never settles an environmental decision, because the decision also depends on what is valued.

In a drainage basin, water moves as surface runoff from a hillslope into a stream; elsewhere in the same basin liquid water evaporates from a lake into the atmosphere. These two processes are respectively

• a transfer and a transformation
• a transformation and a transfer respectively
• two transfers of the same water storage
• two transformations within one storage

Answer: a transfer and a transformation

A transfer moves matter or energy from one storage to another without changing its form, while a transformation changes the form or state. Runoff only changes where the water is; evaporation changes liquid to vapour.