Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 52

The Mesabi Range in Minnesota lies on the western side of Lake Superior, and the ore is carried by lake steamer to the steel towns of the lower lakes, among them Gary, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where it meets Appalachian coal.

Osaka, in the Kansai industrial region, became the leading cotton textile centre of Japan, helped by a humid climate suited to spinning, a good harbour, cheap labour drawn from the countryside and a large home market, and the comparison with Manchester in England, the original Cottonopolis, is standard in textbooks.

The Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg has produced a large share of all the gold ever mined, from conglomerate reefs that dip deep underground, and the city of Johannesburg itself grew out of the gold rush of 1886.

Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world, and Escondida, in the same desert, is the other name to remember.

Ghawar, discovered in 1948 in the eastern province of the kingdom, has been the largest conventional oil field known anywhere, and it is the field most often named in exams along with Safaniya, the biggest offshore field, also Saudi.

Kiruna lies in Swedish Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle, and works a high-grade magnetite deposit of the Baltic Shield. Its ore is carried by rail to Narvik in Norway, an ice-free port warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, and to Lulea on the Gulf of Bothnia.

The two hemispheres always have opposite seasons, so one hemisphere's summer solstice is the other's winter solstice. On about 21 June the Sun is overhead at the Tropic of Cancer; the northern hemisphere has its longest day and summer begins there, while the southern hemisphere has its shortest day.

Lonar Lake in Buldhana district of Maharashtra fills a crater made by a meteorite impact. The Lonar crater was formed in prehistoric times when a meteorite struck the basalt rock of the Deccan Plateau.

New Zealand forms the south-western corner of the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific islands are grouped into three regions.

Among the four rocky inner planets, Earth is the largest, with a diameter of about 12,742 km. The inner or terrestrial planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, all made of rock and metal.

The route runs from the dry west to the wet east coast, so the vegetation changes as rainfall rises. Bikaner lies in the Thar Desert of western Rajasthan, where rainfall is below about 25 cm and only desert plants such as khejri and cactus grow.

Olivine is a silicate of magnesium and iron that forms greenish crystals and is common in basalt. Olivine takes its name from its olive-green colour.

With an area of about 7.86 lakh sq km, New Guinea is the world's second-largest island, after Greenland. New Guinea lies just north of Australia and is shared by two countries: its western half belongs to Indonesia and its eastern half is the mainland of Papua New Guinea.

S-waves are transverse waves: they shake the ground at right angles to their direction of travel, and that sideways motion forms crests and troughs.

Plantations do lie mostly in the humid tropics, but the soils there are generally poor, not highly fertile. Plantation farming grows a single cash crop such as tea, coffee, rubber, sugarcane, cocoa, banana or oil palm on large estates with heavy capital and hired labour.

In January the northern oceans are warmer than the frozen continents, so isotherms bend north over the sea and south over the land; the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift are warm currents, not cold ones.

Mahua and teak shed their leaves in the dry season, while the jackfruit tree is evergreen.

A volcanic eruption throws out solid fragments, fine ash and dust, and a mixture of gases that includes nitrogen and sulphur compounds.

Pairs 1 and 2 are correct; Visakhapatnam is not India's largest container port. Kamarajar Port at Ennore, near Chennai in Tamil Nadu, was the first major port in India to be set up as a corporate entity, registered as a public company (Ennore Port Ltd).

The troposphere is thickest over the equator because strong convection there carries heat high into the air. The troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere where almost all weather occurs, is about 18 km thick at the equator but only about 8 km at the poles.