📚 How to solve these questions: 12 tips for all 6 Interactive Reading question types, with a worked example for each.
Biodiversity loss is frequently presented as a moral question, and it is one, but the framing has an 1 side effect. It invites the reply that other priorities are more urgent, and that reply is difficult to answer if the only argument offered is that species have a right to exist. The functional argument is less inspiring and considerably harder to 2. Ecosystems 3 things that would otherwise have to be paid for, including pollination, water filtration, flood control, and the stabilization of soil. These services are invisible in national accounts because nobody 4 for them, which is precisely why they are undersupplied. Attempts to price them have produced a familiar difficulty. A number makes the service visible in decisions where it previously counted as zero, and the same number invites the conclusion that the service can be traded away once the price is met. Several schemes have permitted the destruction of a wetland on the grounds that an equivalent one would be created elsewhere, which assumes an interchangeability that ecologists dispute. The deeper problem is that these systems fail in ways that pricing handles badly. Ecological decline is often gradual and then 5, with a threshold that is only identifiable after it has been crossed. Markets are effective at allocating things that respond smoothly to incentives, and a fishery that collapses at an unknown point is not such a thing.