Question : In the following passage, some blanks are given, and against each blank four alternative words are suggested. Choose the correct alternative to complete the passage in a meaningful way.

We know that ________________ (1) untreated waste from the industries and sewage which goes into the rivers will pollute them. But still the  industries and the local bodies do it anyway. We know our refutable thirst for coal or minerals like gold is ________________ (2) entire hills, contributing to the loss of biodiversity and affecting the people living working in this area and living there. Governments and corporations mine them anyway. There’s a word for such sustained, ________________ (3) actions that we perform despite knowing fully well their massive and widespread ecological and environmental fallouts: ecocide. It is, literally, ‘the ________________ (4) of the environment’.
Ecocide is the temr used for the actions that result in the intentional, conscious destruction of the natural environment with consequences for human, animal and plant life. That’s the ________________ (5) in which biologist Arthur Galston used the term for the first time in 1970, at the Conference on War and Responsibility in Washington, D.C. He pointed out the US’s use of Agent Orange – a herbicide used to ________________ (6) forest during the Vietnam War – an action of ecocide. Galston was the first to associate the willful destruction of nature with genocide, which is ________________ (7) as an international crime.

Q.Choose the correct word to be used in blank 6

Option 1: Fallowing
 

Option 2: Lancing
 

Option 3: Beleaguer
 

Option 4: Defoliate

Team Careers360 19th Jan, 2024