Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Nobody thought to count the house sparrow while it was everywhere, and that is the first difficulty in explaining where it went. Through the 1990s and 2000s, people in many Indian cities noticed that the small brown bird that once hopped across every veranda was now hard to find. Birdwatchers’ records suggest the loss has been sharpest in the big cities, while villages and small towns have kept more of their flocks.
Why it happened is still argued over, and no single cause has been proven. The likely suspects, though, have something in common. An old house, with its tiled roof, wooden beams and cracks under the eaves, offered a sparrow endless places to nest; a block of glass and concrete offers almost none. The parents live largely on seeds, but their chicks need soft insects in their first days, and a neighbourhood of paved yards and clipped lawns of foreign grass breeds few insects. Grain that once spilled outside the corner shop now comes in sealed packets. Hedges and kitchen gardens have given way to parking. Radiation from mobile towers is often blamed too, but that popular claim remains unproven. The sparrow, in a sense, was a casualty of tidiness.
The return, where it is happening, is modest. Every 20 March is now marked as World Sparrow Day, and Delhi has made the house sparrow its state bird. Residents in several cities fix nest boxes under their balconies, and some pairs do move in. Yet a box is only half an answer. The pair inside needs insects for its young close by, so the more practical volunteers now plant native shrubs beside the boxes and leave one corner of the garden untrimmed.
The phrase ‘a casualty of tidiness’, as used in the passage, suggests that the sparrow was:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → harmed as cities grew too orderly to offer it shelter or food
A casualty is someone or something harmed or lost because of an event. Here the event is the city becoming neat and tidy.
- The line comes at the end of the list of likely causes. Old cracks have given way to “glass and concrete”, yards are paved, grain comes “in sealed packets” and hedges have given way to parking.
- Each change made the city cleaner and more orderly. Each also took away a place to nest or something to eat. No one meant to harm the bird. It was hurt along the way. Example: The small bookshop near our school became a casualty of online shopping.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: harmed by residents who chased it off to keep their homes clean — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: A casualty is harmed as a side effect. The passage never says anyone drove the birds away on purpose.
Option 2: harmed by its own habit of building untidy nests in houses — Incorrect. Misread: The tidiness belongs to the city, not to the bird. The passage says nothing about the sparrow’s nests being untidy.
Option 3: harmed by the chemicals used to clean city streets and drains — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage names no cleaning chemicals. Its tidiness is about sealed buildings, paved yards and packed grain.