Question

Assertion :Indiscriminate exploitation of economically important plants may lead to their extinction. Reason: Conservation of the germplasm is responsible for extinction of the species.

• A. Both Assertion and Reason are correct and Reason is the correct explanation for Assertion.
• B. Both Assertion and Reason are correct but Reason is not the correct explanation for Assertion.
• C. Assertion is correct but Reason is incorrect.
• D. Assertion is incorrect and Reason is correct.

Answer 1

Answer: (C)

The correct option is C Assertion is correct but Reason is incorrect.
Extinction is the end of a group of organisms (taxon), normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the group (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point). Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "re-appears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence.
Many factors are driving an unprecedented rate of extinction of plant and animal species world wide. Although extinction is a natural process, the rate at which current extinction is taking place is clearly not, and all scientific evidence indicates that the activities of man kind are the primary engine behind most recent and present extinction events.
Major causes of extinction include:

• Habitat Loss
• Unregulated or Illegal Killing, Hunting or Poaching
• Introduced Species
• Pollution
• Competition
• Disease

Plant in vitro technology offers a potential solution to both the long term storage of germplasm and mass production of species categorized as endangered.