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 main purpose of the passage is:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → to show that a bleached reef can recover, but only if the hot spells leave it enough time
The passage clears up what bleaching means and then names the real danger.
- The writer says the word bleaching “misleads”. A bleached coral “is still alive” for a while. It has only “started to starve”.
- If the water cools in time, the algae and the colour can return. Reefs can even grow back, “given enough quiet years”.
- The last paragraph says “the trouble lies in the gap” between hot spells. A coral still weak from one bleaching meets the next “with less to spare”.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: to describe what divers found on the Lakshadweep reefs in the summer of 1998 — Incorrect. Too narrow: The divers’ report is only the opening scene. The passage goes on to explain bleaching and recovery.
Option 3: to argue that scientists should stop using the word ‘bleaching’, since it gives a false picture of the harm done to reefs — Incorrect. Overstated: The writer does call the word misleading. But this is one remark, and no change of name is asked for.
Option 4: to explain how corals and the algae inside them help each other to live — Incorrect. Too narrow: The coral and its algae fill only the second paragraph. The passage is mainly about whether a bleached reef can recover.