Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 60

Relative humidity compares the water vapour actually present in the air with the maximum amount the air could hold at that temperature, so it is a ratio and is stated as a percentage; air at a hundred per cent relative humidity is saturated.

A hygrometer measures the humidity of the air, and the common working form is the psychrometer, a pair of wet and dry bulb thermometers whose difference in reading is converted into relative humidity with a table.

Julia was a storm of the Atlantic basin and never approached India, so it cannot belong to a list of Indian landfalls.

The local names of the tropical cyclone are a standing favourite: baguio belongs to the Philippines, hurricane to the United States and the wider Atlantic and Caribbean region, typhoon to China and the north-western Pacific, and willy-willy to Australia.

Tauktae formed in the Arabian Sea in May 2021, intensified into an extremely severe cyclonic storm, moved north along the Konkan coast and made landfall in Gujarat, which is why it is remembered as an Arabian Sea system of the western coast.

The eye of a tropical cyclone is the roughly circular column of calm, descending air at its centre, usually a few tens of kilometres across, where the pressure is lowest, the winds are light and the sky is often nearly clear.

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest railway line in the world, about 9,289 km from Moscow, with through services from St. Petersburg, to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of Russia.

Cashew does best on light, well drained, slightly acidic red laterite soil, which is why it is grown on the coastal plains and hill slopes of Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.

Koeppen grouped climates by temperature and rainfall and gave each group a capital letter, and E stands for the polar group, where the mean temperature of the warmest month stays below 10 degrees Celsius.

In its middle course, over the gentle slope of the plain, a river loses the power to cut downward and begins to swing from side to side.

A desert shows the largest difference between day and night temperature, called the diurnal range, because dry sand heats up quickly in the day and the cloudless, moisture-free air lets that heat escape just as quickly after sunset.

In a flow channel the water runs from the canal head down to the fields purely under gravity, because the bed of the canal is laid at a slope and the source lies higher than the land it serves.

Abundant rainfall, warm temperatures and thick vegetation together supply the water, the heat and the organic acids that speed up solution, hydrolysis, hydration, carbonation and oxidation, so minerals are decomposed deeply.

A valley glacier reaching the coast scoops its floor below present sea level; when the ice melts and the sea rises, water floods the trough and leaves a long, narrow, steep-sided inlet with great depth.

The term comes from the Kras or Karst plateau of the Dinaric region, which lies largely in present-day Slovenia and extends into the neighbouring coastal belt.

A moraine is the ridge of unsorted rock debris that a glacier carries and dumps; it is named by position as lateral, medial, ground or terminal moraine, and the terminal moraine marks the farthest point the ice reached.

Loess is a depositional landform of wind: very fine silt lifted from desert and glacial margins is carried far away and settles as a yellow, porous, loosely packed sheet.

In its middle and lower course a river swings from side to side, eroding the outer bank of each bend and depositing on the inner bank.

Rainwater charged with carbon dioxide becomes a weak carbonic acid, seeps along joints in limestone and dissolves calcium carbonate by carbonation.

Exfoliation is caused by repeated heating and cooling of the outer layer of a rock and by the release of pressure when overlying material is removed; the surface expands and contracts more than the interior and splits away as curved sheets.