Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 61

Water erosion passes through stages, and the soil lost grows at every stage. Splash erosion, numbered II, is the first and mildest: raindrops strike bare soil and knock single particles a few centimetres away.

Overgrazing strips the protective cover of grass, loosens the surface with hooves and leaves bare soil exposed to rain and wind, so it is one of the leading causes of soil erosion in dry India, never a remedy.

Bad lands are stretches of land cut into a close network of deep gullies and sharp ridges, so dissected that cultivation becomes impossible, and they are produced when running water removes the topsoil through sheet wash that concentrates first into rills and then into gullies.

It rises in the Black Forest of Germany, flows east across central and south-eastern Europe past Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary and Belgrade in Serbia, and ends in a delta on the Black Sea.

The Rub al Khali, whose name is usually translated as the Empty Quarter, occupies the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and it is the largest unbroken sand sea on earth.

The range runs roughly north to south through Russia from the Arctic coast towards the Caspian, and geographers have long used it, with the Ural river and the Caucasus, as the conventional line dividing the European part of Eurasia from the Asian part.

The Volga rises in the hills north-west of Moscow, flows across European Russia and ends in a delta near Astrakhan on the Caspian, which is a landlocked basin and the largest inland water body on earth.

Its basin lies on both sides of the Equator in central Africa, so the river crosses the line once as it flows north and again as it swings west and south towards the Atlantic.

The Atacama lies along the Pacific side of northern Chile, dried by two causes together: the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side and put it in a deep rain shadow, and the cold Peru or Humboldt current offshore chills the air so that little moisture moves inland.

The correct answer is B, the Sahara, which stretches across North Africa through about eleven countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea and is the largest hot desert on earth.

Aconcagua stands in the Andes in the Mendoza region of western Argentina, close to the Chilean border, and at about 6,961 metres it is the highest summit of both the Americas and of the southern hemisphere, and so the highest anywhere outside Asia.

The range runs about 7,000 kilometres down the western edge of South America through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and it carries Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia.

The White Nile comes from the Lake Victoria region of East Africa and carries a steady flow; the Blue Nile rises at Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands and brings the summer flood and most of the silt.

At a little over 6,600 kilometres it is the river that standard references and examination papers treat as the longest, flowing north through Sudan and Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea from two branches, the White Nile of the Lake Victoria region and the Blue Nile of Lake Tana in Ethiopia.

The north-east trade winds blow over India in the winter season, roughly from October to February.

Minicoy is the southernmost island of the Lakshadweep group, and it lies well apart from the rest of the archipelago.

India covers about 32.87 lakh square kilometres, which is roughly 2.4 per cent of the world's total land area. That small share supports about 17 to 18 per cent of the world's people, and this gap between land and population is what the question is really testing.

The cold snow-forest climate, group D in Koeppen's scheme, lies in the continental interiors of the northern hemisphere between about 40 and 70 degrees north, across northern Europe, Siberia, Canada and Alaska.

The Banihal Pass crosses the Pir Panjal range and is the gateway between the Jammu region and the Kashmir valley, carrying the Jammu to Srinagar national highway at a height of about 2832 metres.

The interior of the country has the sharpest difference between summer and winter because it lies far from the sea, and this effect is called continentality.