Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 24

The Northern Atlantic Sea Route links the north-eastern seaboard of North America with the industrial countries of western Europe, and because the two most developed manufacturing regions of the world face each other across this stretch of ocean it carries more traffic than any other sea route.

It crosses the isthmus of Central America, where the land rises well above sea level, so ships cannot simply be floated through.

The Suez Canal was cut across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt and opened in 1869.

The line begins in European Russia and runs eastward across the whole of Siberia, and Vladivostok is both its terminus and the principal Russian naval and commercial port on the Pacific.

It runs across Russia from St Petersburg and Moscow in the west to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, a distance of about 9,289 km from Moscow, and no other single railway line in the world is as long.

The southernmost of India's major ports is V. O. Chidambaranar Port, long known as Tuticorin, which lies on the Gulf of Mannar in the Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu.

Evaporation is the escape of molecules from a liquid surface into the air, and it slows as the air above fills with vapour; when the humidity falls the air can hold more vapour, so the rate of evaporation rises.

High clouds such as cirrus are thin and made of ice crystals; they let most of the sunlight pass through but absorb the outgoing infrared radiation from the surface, so their net effect is to warm.

In convection the heated matter itself moves and carries its energy with it: air near a warm surface expands, becomes lighter, rises as a current and is replaced by cooler air sinking in its place, and the same happens in a pan of boiling water.

An isotherm joins places of equal temperature, and on a world map the isotherms run roughly east to west, parallel to the latitudes, bending sharply where a continent meets an ocean because land and water heat at different rates.

Insolation measured at the top of the atmosphere is greatest over the equator, but what reaches the ground depends on cloud as well as on the angle of the rays, and the subtropical deserts lie under the descending limb of the Hadley circulation, where the sky is clear for most…

An inversion needs the ground to lose heat quickly and the air above to stay undisturbed: a long night gives time for terrestrial radiation to escape, a clear sky lets it escape, dry air absorbs little of it, and calm conditions keep the cold air lying in place, so the…

Advection is the sideways or horizontal transfer of heat by moving air, and in the middle latitudes most of the day to day variation in temperature comes from it; the hot loo that blows over north India in summer and the cold wave that follows a north-westerly wind in winter…

The orbit of the earth is an ellipse, so the distance from the sun changes through the year; the earth is closest at perihelion about the third of January and farthest at aphelion about the fourth of July, which is option D and the usual distractor in this question.

This is the normal lapse rate, the average fall of temperature with height in the troposphere, and it is the reason a hill station is cool while the plain at the same latitude is hot.

Of every hundred units of insolation arriving at the top of the atmosphere, about thirty-five are turned back before they can heat the ground, twenty-seven from the tops of clouds, two from snow and ice covered surfaces and the remainder scattered by the atmosphere; this reflected share is the albedo…

The word is a contraction of incoming solar radiation, and it means the short-wave energy from the sun that reaches the earth, measured in India by the India Meteorological Department in units of energy per unit area per unit time.

These are cirrocumulus clouds: high clouds of ice crystals arranged in small white puffs and ripples. Clouds are grouped by height and shape.

. Statement D is the incorrect one: the streams on a dissected volcanic cone do form a radial drainage pattern.

Adiabatic temperature changes in the atmosphere are caused by the expansion and compression of air, with no heat added or removed.