Q.Deriving countless direct economic benefits from nature by humans is ........ argument for conservation of biodiversity.

Why bother conserving biodiversity at all? The chapter doesn't lean on just one argument — it gives three, deliberately different in character, because different people find different reasons persuasive.

The narrowly utilitarian argument is the most direct: biodiversity hands us tangible products we can put a price on. Food, firewood, fibre, and construction materials all come straight from it. The chapter's own headline statistic makes the point sharply — more than 25% of the drugs sold worldwide are derived from plants, and 25,000 plant species contribute to the traditional medicine systems used by native peoples around the world. This is also where bioprospecting lives: the deliberate search through nature's chemistry for the next useful compound. …