Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 14

In Köppen's code, C means a warm temperate climate, f means rain in all seasons with no dry season, and a means a hot summer.

The mistral is a cold, dry northerly wind that blows from the Alps down the Rhone valley of France to the Mediterranean coast.

The Tsangpo enters India as the Dihang and the Godavari has the second largest basin, but the Chambal and Betwa join the Yamuna, not the Ganga.

Feldspar makes up about half of the earth's crust and is light cream to salmon pink in colour, but magnesium is not its common element.

When sandstone, made mostly of quartz grains, is put under great heat and pressure, the grains fuse together and the rock turns into quartzite.

The volcanoes of Hawaii, such as Mauna Loa and Kilauea, are broad, gently sloping cones built by runny basaltic lava.

Above the tree line in the western and central Himalaya the mean temperature of even the warmest month stays below ten degrees Celsius, which is the defining condition of the E group, and the tundra and ice-cap variants of that group occupy the high valleys and the snowfields.

C. W. Thornthwaite measured precipitation effectiveness and thermal efficiency, that is, the balance between the water a place receives and the water it loses to evaporation and transpiration, and because these are derived quantities rather than raw readings his scheme is called rational.

Koppen was born in Russia and worked in Germany, and his training in plant science is the reason his classification uses natural vegetation as the index of climate and sets its boundaries where vegetation belts change.

Koppen set the boundary of the tropical group at a mean temperature of 18 degrees Celsius in the coldest month, the value below which many tropical plants cannot thrive, and the whole of peninsular India as well as both coasts clears it.

Within the dry B group Koppen used two capital letters for the degree of dryness, S for the steppe, which is semi-arid, and W for the desert, which is fully arid, so BShw describes a hot semi-arid climate with a dry winter.

The interior of the Deccan is hot in every month, which gives it the capital A, and it has a long dry season with moderate rain in summer, which gives it the small letter w, the classic savannah combination.

Over most of the Ganga plain the temperature rises steadily through the spring and peaks in May, before the rains break, after which cloud and moisture bring the readings down, and Koppen gave this particular annual march of temperature its own letter.

The capital D marks a cold snow forest climate in which the coldest month falls below minus three degrees Celsius, f marks the absence of a dry season and c marks a short summer with fewer than four months above ten degrees Celsius, and in the standard table for India…

The capital B marks a dry climate, the capital W marks the arid or desert subdivision, h marks a hot climate and the last w marks a dry winter, so the whole code describes the heart of the Thar, the driest part of the country.

This coast lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats while the south-west monsoon blows, so its summer is comparatively dry, and it gets most of its rain between October and December from the retreating monsoon and the north-east monsoon, which is exactly what the small letter s records.

The code stands for a monsoon climate with a short dry season: the Malabar coast is hot in every month, so the capital A applies, and it receives extremely heavy rain from the south-west monsoon, leaving only a brief dry spell.

Koppen, who was a botanist as well as a climatologist, held that natural vegetation is the best single index of climate, and he fixed his boundaries using the monthly values of temperature and rainfall that vegetation belts seem to follow.

Odisha lies between about 17 and 22 degrees north, so it stays just south of the Tropic of Cancer, which is the reason it is the most common wrong choice in this question.

It is the only belt in which the noon sun can be vertically overhead at some time of the year, so it receives the most direct insolation and has the highest average temperatures.