Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.
"Pandemic" is a household word today. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, it was the most searched word in 2020 and was declared the word of the year- thanks to COVID-19, the latest, but not the last, pandemic that humanity encounters.
A disease outbreak across continents and spreading globally is a pandemic. Hundreds of them have "plagued" humankind down the millennia, and we have records of major outbreaks such as "The Plague". The three plague pandemics over different regions and periods, killed as many as 350 million people approximately. This was followed by seven major outbreaks of cholera, five of influenza, and three of Coronavirus, including the latest.
How and when do pandemics originate? There is enough evidence to suggest that infections of pandemic proportions emerged when the hunter-gatherer, nomadic tribes transitioned into more sedentary agrarian settlers. By a rough estimate, infectious diseases could have emerged only within the past 11,000 years following the rise of agriculture. For infections to spread and sustain, it needed large groups of population. Such settlements were unheard of in history before the advent of agriculture. Such diseases were earlier called "crowd diseases". The twin disease burden that humanity faces - communicable diseases such as influenza, chicken pox and non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer owe their origin to a great extent to this transition of man from hunter-gatherer to agriculturist. To put it simply, the growth of civilisation is the root cause of diseases.
Most microbes which cause diseases were originally colonising animals. For a disease to establish as a pandemic, complex movements of animal-human transmission are involved. This again was facilitated when the agrarians domesticated animals such as goats, cows, horses and pigs. In the process of milching, riding, ploughing they established longer and closer nearness which made such animal-to-human transmission possible.