Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 53

The atmosphere is heated mainly from below, by the Earth's own long wave (terrestrial) radiation, not directly by sunlight. Incoming solar radiation is short wave, and the atmosphere is largely transparent to it, so most of it passes through and heats the Earth's surface.

The Kiel Canal, opened in 1895, cuts across the base of the Jutland peninsula in northern Germany and lets ships pass from the North Sea to the Baltic without sailing round Denmark; it is one of the busiest artificial waterways in the world.

Enclosed by the United States, Mexico and the island of Cuba, the Gulf of Mexico is the largest gulf on earth, and it is the nursery of the hurricanes that strike the American coast as well as the home of the warm Gulf Stream.

The Mozambique Channel is the stretch of the Indian Ocean between Mozambique on the African mainland and the island of Madagascar, and at roughly 1,600 kilometres in length it is counted as the longest channel in the world; the Comoros lie at its northern mouth.

The Ten Degree Channel takes its name from the parallel of ten degrees north that runs along it, and it divides the Andaman group of islands from the Nicobar group, lying between Little Andaman in the north and Car Nicobar in the south.

Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears, lies between Yemen on the Asian side and Djibouti and Eritrea on the African side, and it is the southern doorway of the Red Sea, opening into the Gulf of Aden and then the Arabian Sea; every ship using the Suez Canal on the India-Europe…

The Strait of Gibraltar is the narrow entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean, with the Rock of Gibraltar on the European side and Jebel Musa on the African side; the two headlands were known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules.

The Bering Strait lies between the Chukchi peninsula of Russia and the Seward peninsula of Alaska, joining the Arctic Ocean to the Bering Sea, and the International Date Line passes through it; in the ice ages a land bridge here allowed people and animals to cross into America.

The Panama Canal does not cut through at sea level; ships are lifted by locks into the artificial Gatun Lake, sail across it and through the Culebra or Gaillard Cut, and are then lowered by locks on the other side, which is why the canal needs a large freshwater reservoir.

The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, runs about 193 kilometres across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt from Port Said on the Mediterranean to the city of Suez on the Red Sea, and because the two seas stand at nearly the same level the canal needs no locks.

The Strait of Hormuz runs between the Iranian coast and the Musandam peninsula of Oman and is the only sea route out of the Persian Gulf, leading into the Gulf of Oman and from there into the Arabian Sea; that is why it is the world's most sensitive oil chokepoint.

The Palk Strait lies between the Ramanathapuram coast of Tamil Nadu and the Jaffna region of northern Sri Lanka, and it joins Palk Bay in the north with the Gulf of Mannar in the south; the shoals of Adam's Bridge run across its southern end.

Sir Creek is a tidal creek in the marshland of the Rann of Kutch, where India and Pakistan read the boundary resolution of 1914 differently, one side placing the boundary in the middle of the channel and the other on its eastern bank; the stretch matters because it affects the…

The states along the Bangladesh frontier are West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, with West Bengal carrying the longest stretch.

The correct answer is B, the Andaman and the Nicobar groups, which lie on either side of the Ten Degree Channel in the Bay of Bengal, the name coming from the ten degree north parallel along which it runs.

The correct answer is B, the Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar, the shallow waters between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, with the chain of sandbanks called Adam's Bridge or Rama Setu running between Rameswaram and Talaimannar.

The line was drawn at the Simla Convention of 1914 by Sir Henry McMahon, then the Foreign Secretary of British India, in an agreement with Tibet; China has never accepted it, which is the root of the dispute in that sector.

The line was drawn in 1947 by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who chaired the boundary commissions that divided Punjab and Bengal, so the same line also forms the India-Bangladesh boundary, Bangladesh having been East Pakistan until 1971.

The correct answer is B, Afghanistan, with which India's land boundary is only about 106 kilometres long, lying in the part of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir that is under Pakistan's control, near the Wakhan Corridor.

The correct answer is C, Bangladesh, with a boundary of about 4,096 kilometres, the longest India has with any country; it runs along West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram.