Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 10

Rajasthan is divided into ten agro-climatic zones, which run from the arid western plain and the hyper arid partially irrigated zone in the west, through the irrigated north western plain and the two transitional plains of inland drainage and the Luni basin, to the semi arid and flood prone eastern…

The Lower Gangetic Plain, essentially West Bengal, has heavy rainfall, humid air and the alluvium of the delta, the conditions jute needs for growing and for retting, and it grows rice and potato along with it.

The fifteenth of the Planning Commission zones is a separate Islands region made up of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea, with equatorial rainfall, thin coral or lateritic soils and coconut, areca nut, spices and fisheries as the mainstay.

Kharif crops are sown in June and July as the south west monsoon arrives and harvested in September and October, and they are the rain dependent crops: rice, jowar, bajra, maize, cotton, groundnut, soyabean and tur.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 laid down that one third of the total geographical area of the country should be under forest, and it fixed separate norms inside that target: about 60 per cent in the hills, where tree cover protects the slopes and the catchments, and about 20…

The ratio tells how many crops the sown land carries in an agricultural year, so a value of a hundred would mean a single crop everywhere and the Indian figure of about 140 per cent means that a large part of the land bears a second crop, mainly where irrigation…

Gross cropped area is a derived measure, not a land use head: it counts a field as many times as it is cropped in an agricultural year, so the same hectare can appear twice or thrice, and it is used with net sown area to calculate cropping intensity.

This head covers land that could be cultivated but has lain unused for more than five years, usually because it has become saline, waterlogged, eroded or short of water, and bringing it back into use is a standing aim of land reclamation programmes.

The Western Dry zone is western Rajasthan, the Thar region west of the Aravalli, with low and uncertain rainfall, sandy soil and a short growing season, so its crops are bajra, moth, guar and other hardy millets and pulses, with animal husbandry as the main support.

The Trans-Gangetic Plain zone lies beyond the Yamuna, that is on the Punjab side of the Ganga system, and takes in Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and the Ganganagar belt of Rajasthan; its canal and tubewell irrigation supports the wheat and rice rotation of the green revolution.

In 1988 the Planning Commission adopted a division of the country into fifteen agro-climatic zones so that crops, irrigation, credit and research could be planned for areas that are uniform in rainfall, temperature, soil and cropping pattern.

Rajasthan is divided into ten agro-climatic zones, and zone three B is the flood prone eastern plain, which covers Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur, Karauli and Sawai Madhopur, the districts drained by the Banganga, Gambhir and Chambal where heavy monsoon flows cause waterlogging.

The Bering Strait lies between the easternmost point of Asia and the westernmost point of North America and links the Bering Sea of the Pacific with the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean; the International Date Line runs through it, and the Diomede Islands within it belong one to Russia…

It receives a very large river inflow from northern Europe, lies in a cool region where evaporation is slight, and exchanges water with the North Sea only through the narrow Danish straits, so its water is brackish rather than fully saline, especially in the Gulf of Bothnia.

The Dead Sea lies in the rift valley of the Jordan river, which flows into it and has no outlet, so dissolved salts have gone on accumulating until the water is several times as salty as the ocean and almost nothing lives in it; its shore is more than four…

It is a northern extension of the Black Sea, joined to it by the Kerch Strait, and its depth nowhere much exceeds a dozen metres, which makes it the shallowest sea on earth; the Don river empties into it.

The Aral Sea is a landlocked salt lake of Central Asia that lost most of its water after the Soviet authorities diverted its two feeding rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton, leaving salt flats, stranded fishing boats and a ruined local climate; it is the…

This strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, leads into the Gulf of Aden and so to the Arabian Sea, and together with the Suez Canal at the northern end it makes the Red Sea a link in the…

Despite its name it has no outlet to any ocean and is therefore a lake, the largest enclosed water body on earth; it is bordered by five countries, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan, and is fed mainly by the Volga.

Lying in the middle of the North Atlantic, it is bounded on all sides by the currents of the North Atlantic gyre rather than by any coast, and it takes its name from the floating Sargassum weed in which European and American eels breed.