Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 26

Of the three, only the West Wind Drift is a cold current; the Alaska Current and the North Atlantic Drift are warm.

Very heavy rainfall, high and steady temperature, humidity above 75 per cent and trees that stay green all year are the marks of tropical wet evergreen forests.

In slash-and-burn farming the felled trees and undergrowth are dried and burnt on the spot, and the ash left behind is rich in potash and other mineral nutrients, which the cultivator depends on because no chemical fertiliser or farmyard manure is used.

The Mediterranean climate, with its hot dry summer and mild wet winter, suits the vine better than almost any other region, and the lands around the Mediterranean sea, together with California, central Chile, the Cape region of South Africa and parts of southern Australia, are the world's great wine-producing areas…

The kolkhoz was the collective farm of the former Soviet Union, in which land, implements, livestock and labour were pooled and the farm worked under state direction with production targets fixed by the plan; the state farm, worked wholly by wage earners, was called the sovkhoz.

Where population is dense and holdings have been divided by inheritance over generations, as in India, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia, the farmer puts in abundant labour, manure and irrigation water on a tiny field and takes more than one crop a year.

Sericulture is the rearing of silkworms on mulberry or other host leaves for the production of raw silk, and it is an allied activity of farming that supports lakhs of rural households in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Jammu and Kashmir.

Dry farming, also called dryland farming, is the practice of raising crops without irrigation in areas of low and uncertain rainfall, and the conventional limit used in Indian geography is an annual rainfall of about seventy-five centimetres.

The correct answer is C, Indonesia and Malaysia, where the forest clearings of the equatorial islands are called ladang and are cropped with dry rice, maize and root crops for a few seasons.

The correct answer is B, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, where the hill communities of the Eastern Ghats call shifting cultivation podu.

Jhum, also written jhoom, is the local name of shifting cultivation in Assam and the hill states of the north-east, where a forest patch on a slope is cleared, burnt and cropped for two or three years before being left fallow.

Milpa is the local name given to the slash-and-burn system of the Mexican and Central American forests, where maize, beans and squash are grown together on a burnt forest clearing for a few seasons.

A plantation crop is a single cash crop grown on a large estate with heavy capital, hired labour and processing of the produce on or near the estate, and coffee, grown in the hills of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is a classic example along with tea, rubber and sugarcane.

Olericulture is the branch of horticulture that deals with vegetables, covering their production in the field, their storage, their processing and their marketing, and it is the branch on which market gardening and truck farming rest.

The Sirhind Canal is taken from the Sutlej at Ropar, now Rupnagar, and is one of the oldest canal systems of Punjab, irrigating a large tract of the Malwa region and parts of Haryana.

The Agra Canal leaves the right bank of the Yamuna at the Okhla barrage to the south of Delhi and carries water to the districts of Agra and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, with branches reaching parts of Haryana and Rajasthan.

The scheme was launched in 2015 to bring the scattered irrigation programmes under one roof, and its components include Har Khet Ko Pani, which aims to extend assured irrigation to every field, Per Drop More Crop, which promotes drip and sprinkler systems, the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme for incomplete major…

In drip irrigation water is carried through pipes and released slowly, drop by drop, at the root zone of each plant through emitters, so losses to evaporation, runoff and deep percolation are the lowest of all methods and fertiliser can be delivered with the water.

Tank irrigation is characteristic of the peninsula, especially Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, for three reasons: the hard crystalline rock of the plateau makes the digging of wells difficult and holds little groundwater, the rivers of the peninsula are seasonal and cannot feed perennial canals, and the uneven…

Groundwater drawn through wells and tube wells irrigates the largest part of the net irrigated area of India, and its share has risen steadily since the Green Revolution because a tube well gives water on demand, close to the field and without waiting for a canal turn.