Jharkhand PSC Prelim Exam 2008 Solved Paper

(1) A diversity index is a quantitative measure that reflects how many different types (such as species) there are in a dataset(a community), and simultaneously takes into account how evenly the basic entities (such as individuals) are distributed among those types. The most commonly used diversity indices are simple transformations of the effective number of types (also known as 'true diversity'), but each diversity index can also be interpreted in its own right as a measure corresponding to some real phenomenon (but a different one for each diversity index.