Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 3...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.

        Conservation often justifies novel tools on two instrumental grounds: efficiency and necessity. Efficiency says technologies help practitioners do the same work better – mapping, monitoring, curbing impacts – thereby refining decisions. Necessity says some tools are last resorts: without them, species or lineages fail. Many genomics projects fit one or both logics, from disease-resistant chestnuts to breeding programs steered by genetic data. [I] By contrast, de-extinction does not simply optimize or salvage recognized aims; it refocuses attention on fabricating close proxies of organisms no longer extant, inviting a different, more contested kind of evaluation.

        Advocates of an interventionist future invoke the Anthropocene: humans have massively reshaped Earth’s systems, so stewardship must be proactive, even garden-like. The background conditions anchoring place-based protection – stable climate, predictable baselines – are eroding; hence, assisted colonisation or gene drives may be the responsible course when habitats shift irreversibly. [II] On this view, nostalgia is a poor guide; conservation should be forward-looking, managing rambling, human-touched ecologies rather than chasing an unrecoverable past. The ethical thrust is not whether to intervene, but how to govern intervention so species can persist amid durable anthropogenic change.

        De-extinction sits awkwardly here: its techniques are novel, yet its goal is to reach back and reassemble what history has scattered. [III] Because ecological communities have moved on, habitats may be gone, relationships frayed, and released proxies could disrupt recipient systems. Moreover, genomes alone do not restore the relational values – ecological roles, cultural meanings, co-evolved dependencies – that make species significant. De-extinction, being backward-looking, rarely restores the value-grounding relationships that make species matter. This tension makes it harder to justify than tools that tackle causes directly, such as eliminating invasive vectors or enhancing diversity within still-extant, recovering populations.

        Consequently, many urge prioritising scalable projects that address drivers – climate stress, pathogens, invasives – over spectacular revivals. Gene-drive suppression of disease-carrying mosquitoes for Hawaiʻian birds, or genomic cloning to widen black-footed ferret diversity, aims to repair functioning ties rather than stage returns. [IV] Proponents reply that de-extinction might occasionally yield ecological gains or spur useful innovation, but even sympathetic accounts concede its limited upside. What is worse is this deeper problem: our systems often lack a viable place for the vanished, so manufacturing likenesses neither cures the causes nor mends the entanglements they once sustained.

(Adapted from Hastings Center Report, Wiley Online, “A New Ethics for New Science?”)

Question 31. According to paragraph 1, the efficiency rationale claims novel tools ______.

A. help do existing conservation tasks more effectively without redefining objectives

B. replace field ecologists entirely through automation and remote sensing capabilities

C. create new species deliberately to expand biodiversity beyond historical baselines

D. force emergency relocations whenever monitoring identifies climate risks elsewhere emerging