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.
Which of the following is the most suitable title for the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Bleached, Not Yet Lost: Reefs That Need Time to Heal
This title covers both main points of the passage.
- “Bleached, Not Yet Lost” matches the first half. A white coral “has not died”. It can get its algae and colour back if the water cools.
- “Need Time to Heal” matches the last part. Reefs grow back only “given enough quiet years”, and the hot spells now come with short gaps.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: The Summer the Lakshadweep Reefs Turned White — Incorrect. Too narrow: The summer of 1998 is only the opening. The passage also covers recovery and the later heatwaves.
Option 2: Seaweed: The Quiet Enemy of India’s Coral Islands — Incorrect. Wrong focus: Seaweed appears only in the last line, on rock where corals have already died. The passage puts the harm down to the heat.
Option 3: Coral Walls: How Reefs Shield Island Homes from the Sea — Incorrect. Wrong focus: The reef breaking the ocean swell is one side point in the third paragraph. The passage is about bleaching and recovery.