Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 59

The correct answer is B, the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean, whose Challenger Deep reaches a depth of about eleven kilometres and is the deepest known point on the earth's surface.

Statement I is wrong because the equatorial belt receives very heavy rainfall and has high cloud cover, so the surface water there is diluted; the highest salinity in the open ocean is recorded in the subtropical high pressure belts, roughly between twenty and thirty degrees of latitude, where skies are…

Selvas is the name given to the equatorial rainforest of the Amazon basin, a multi storeyed evergreen forest of hardwoods such as mahogany, ebony and rosewood, with so many species mixed together that commercial logging of a single kind is difficult.

Hot deserts lie on the western margins of continents roughly between 20 and 30 degrees north and south, under the descending dry air of the subtropical high pressure belt.

The taiga is the belt of coniferous softwood forest between about 50 and 70 degrees latitude, and in the southern hemisphere that belt is almost entirely ocean: only the narrow tail of South America and a few islands reach it, which is far too little land for a continuous forest…

The Velds are the temperate grasslands of the high plateau of South Africa, where maize and cattle farming and the gold mining of the Witwatersrand go together.

The Llanos are the grasslands of the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and Colombia and the Campos those of the Brazilian highlands, and both lie in the savanna belt, where a hot wet season alternates with a sharply dry one and the grass grows tall and coarse with scattered thorny trees.

It lies on the western margins of continents between about 30 and 45 degrees latitude, and the wind belts shift with the sun: in winter the rain bearing westerlies move towards the equator and reach it, while in summer the dry descending air of the subtropical high sits over it.

In Koppen scheme the capital A stands for the tropical group, in which the coldest month is still above 18 degrees Celsius, and the small f stands for rain in every month of the year, so Af is the equatorial or tropical rainforest climate of the Amazon, the Congo and…

Bugyal is the local name in Uttarakhand for the alpine meadows that lie above the tree line in the Greater Himalayas, used by shepherds for summer grazing; in Kashmir the same meadows are called marg, which gives the names Gulmarg and Sonmarg.

North America and Prairie is right, as the prairies are the temperate grasslands of the United States and Canada and the granary of the world.

The Gobi lies in central Asia, across southern Mongolia and northern China, and it is a cold mid latitude desert: it is dry not because of the trade winds but because it is far from the sea and the Himalayan and other ranges cut off the monsoon, and its winters…

It is the polar belt beyond about 70 degrees latitude, where the warmest month stays below 10 degrees Celsius and the subsoil remains frozen as permafrost, so Koppen codes it ET in his polar E group.

The Pampas are the temperate grasslands of the lower Parana and Plata basin, spread mainly over Argentina and extending into Uruguay.

When the surface on which condensation occurs is below the freezing point and the dew point is also below it, the vapour changes directly into tiny ice crystals instead of water droplets, and that white deposit is frost; it is common on clear, calm winter nights when the ground loses…

A temperate or extra-tropical cyclone is a frontal system: it forms between about thirty-five and sixty-five degrees latitude where a cold polar air mass meets a warm subtropical one, and the warm air is forced to rise along the front, giving slow and widespread rain over a large area.

The India Meteorological Department grades a system of the north Indian Ocean by its sustained wind speed, and the highest grade, the super cyclonic storm, begins at two hundred and twenty-two kilometres per hour.

The Coriolis force, which arises from the rotation of the earth, is zero at the equator and very weak for a few degrees on either side, so converging air cannot be deflected into the spiral that makes a cyclone; the belt within about five degrees of the equator is therefore…

In the equatorial belt the ground is strongly heated through the morning, the warm moist air rises in powerful convection currents, cools as it rises, condenses into towering cumulonimbus and falls as a short, very heavy shower in the afternoon, which is why it is nicknamed four o'clock rain.

The cumulonimbus is a cloud of great vertical extent that can rise from near the ground almost to the top of the troposphere, and the strong updraughts inside it produce thunder, lightning, heavy showers and hail; it is the cloud of the thunderstorm and the eye wall of a cyclone…