Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 39

The Isthmus of Panama joins North and South America and separates the Caribbean Sea from the Pacific, and the Isthmus of Suez joins Africa to Asia; both have been cut by canals precisely because they are narrow.

Magnetic declination is the angle between true north and magnetic north, and along the agonic line that angle is zero, so a compass needle there points to true north.

Isoseismal lines join points at which the shaking of an earthquake was felt with the same intensity, and because intensity falls away from the source, they are drawn as roughly concentric closed curves around the epicentre, the point of the surface vertically above the focus.

The Greek bathos means depth, so isobaths are the depth contours of a bathymetric chart; the 200 metre isobath is conventionally taken as the outer edge of the continental shelf.

An isohel, from the Greek helios for the sun, joins places that receive sunshine for an equal number of hours, and such maps are used in studies of solar energy potential and of crop seasons.

The word comes from the Greek hyetos, meaning rain, so an isohyet joins all places on a map that receive the same amount of rainfall in a given period; rainfall distribution maps of India, which show the 200 centimetre and 50 centimetre lines, are drawn with isohyets.

The deeply indented coast of Kutch and Saurashtra, with the Gulf of Kachchh and the Gulf of Khambhat, gives Gujarat the longest coastline of any Indian state, ahead of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

These are the latitudes of the southern tip of the mainland at Kanyakumari and of the northernmost part of the country, and between them lie the 3,214 km of the mainland's north-south extent.

The correct answer is C, Bangladesh, with which India shares a border of about 4,096.7 km, the longest of all its land boundaries; it touches five Indian states, West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram.

The Tropic of Cancer, at 23 degrees 30 minutes north, enters India in Gujarat and leaves it in Mizoram, passing on the way through Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tripura and Mizoram.

This meridian, which passes near Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, runs roughly through the middle of the country and was adopted as the standard meridian so that the whole of India could keep one time.

Indira Point lies at the southern end of Great Nicobar, the largest island of the Nicobar group, at about 6 degrees 45 minutes north, and is the southernmost point of the territory of India; it was known as Pygmalion Point before being renamed.

The correct answer is B, Kanyakumari, also called Cape Comorin, in Tamil Nadu, which stands at about 8 degrees 4 minutes north and is the southern tip of the Indian mainland, where the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean are said to meet.

Parallels of latitude are circles drawn parallel to the equator, and they grow shorter as one moves towards the poles, until a pole is a point with no length at all.

The correct answer is B, the Ten Degree Channel, which lies roughly along the parallel of ten degrees north and separates the Andaman group in the north from the Nicobar group in the south; Little Andaman lies to its north and Car Nicobar to its south.

The mainland of India extends from about 68 degrees 7 minutes east to about 97 degrees 25 minutes east, a longitudinal spread of roughly 29 degrees.

These are the threshold temperatures the India Meteorological Department (IMD) uses for declaring heat waves and cold waves.

At about 5,895 m, it is the highest peak in Africa and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world. Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano in north-eastern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border.

Satellite sensors are used to estimate all three, because each leaves a signature in the light or heat a place gives off.

On a mountain slope, rainfall increases with height only up to a certain level and then decreases above it; this is called the inversion of rainfall.