Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
In the summer of 1998, divers in the Lakshadweep lagoons surfaced with a strange report. The reefs had gone white. Branching corals that should have been brown and green stood pale as chalk under warm, clear water. The word for this is bleaching, and it misleads. It suggests something scrubbed clean and finished with. A bleached coral, for a while at least, is still alive.
A coral is a colony of tiny animals called polyps, and it does not live alone. Inside its tissue live even tinier algae. They make food from sunlight, pass most of it on to the coral and give it its colour. When the sea stays too hot for too long, the coral throws the algae out. What is left is clear tissue over a white skeleton. The coral has not died. It has started to starve.
If the water cools in time, the algae can return, and the colour with them. Even a reef that loses much of its coral can grow back, given enough quiet years. Many Lakshadweep reefs did so in the years after 1998. That mattered on land too, because the reef breaks the ocean swell before it reaches the houses on these coral islands.
The trouble lies in the gap between one hot spell and the next. The reefs bleached again in 2010, and again in the marine heatwaves of recent summers. To a reef that needs years to heal, heat that once came as a rare visitor can begin to seem almost unremitting. A coral still weak from the last bleaching meets the next one with less to spare. Where corals die, seaweed spreads over the bare rock, and young corals struggle to settle there.
The word ‘unremitting’, as used in the passage, means:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → continuing without a pause
Unremitting means continuing without a pause.
- The writer says heat that “once came as a rare visitor” can seem “almost unremitting” to a reef that needs years to heal. A rare visitor comes now and then, with long gaps. The heat now seems to come with hardly a break.
- The paragraph is about “the gap between one hot spell and the next”. So the word is about how often the heat comes, not how strong it is. Example: After three days of unremitting rain, the lanes of our colony were full of water.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: growing slowly stronger each time — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of escalating. The passage speaks of short gaps between hot spells, not of each one being stronger. Example: The escalating price of onions worried every family in the market.
Option 3: changing often without any pattern — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of erratic. Example: The bus service in our town is so erratic that we often walk to school.
Option 4: coming suddenly and without warning — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of abrupt. Example: The match came to an abrupt end when the lights failed.