In colonial India, administrators faced an overwhelming population of venomous cobras in Delhi. To address this public safety hazard, the government instituted a policy offering cash bounties for every dead cobra brought to local authorities. Initially, the strategy seemed successful, as citizens actively hunted and killed cobras for the reward. However, enterprising individuals soon realized they could generate steady income by breeding cobras in captivity. When administrators discovered this practice, they immediately canceled the bounty program. Consequently, the breeders released their now-valuable cobras back into the wild, resulting in a cobra population that was significantly larger and more dangerous than it had been before the government intervention began.
The relationship between the administrators’ policy and the citizens’ actions described in the passage is most analogous to which of the following scenarios?
- AA city government taxes companies that produce high levels of pollution, which forces the companies to invest in green technology and ultimately reduces the city’s overall carbon emissions.
- BA conservation group pays landowners to plant native trees, but when the funding runs out, the owners stop planting new trees, leaving the forest canopy at its original pre-program size.
- A tech company pays its customer service agents a bonus for every system bug they resolve. To maximize their payouts, the agents begin writing faulty code that creates simple bugs for them to fix. When the company discovers this and ends the bonus program, the agents abandon their unresolved bug reports, leaving the system with more errors than it had originally.Answer
- DA zoo offers rewards to visitors who help capture escaped lizards, but visitors end up importing lookalike lizards from other regions to claim the reward, resulting in the zoo having to build more enclosures to house them.