Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 62

In Koeppen's scheme the capital letter gives the broad climatic group and the small letters add the rainfall and temperature detail.

The standard school classification divides India's natural vegetation into five groups: tropical evergreen rainforests, tropical deciduous or monsoon forests, tropical thorn forests and scrubs, montane forests, and mangrove or tidal forests.

A stalagmite is built up on the floor of a limestone cave by water that seeps in from above, so the agent at work is underground water.

The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener put forward the continental drift theory in 1912, holding that all continents once formed a single supercontinent called Pangaea, surrounded by a single ocean called Panthalassa, which later split into Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south.

Its thick ice sheet lifts its average elevation above that of every other continent, and it has no permanent population, only the changing crews of research stations maintained under the Antarctic Treaty system; it is also the coldest, driest and windiest continent and counts as the largest cold desert.

It lies in the North Atlantic and is bounded not by land but by four ocean currents, among them the Gulf Stream, which circle its calm, weed-filled waters; the floating sargassum seaweed gives it its name.

The Bering Strait lies between the eastern tip of Siberia and the western tip of Alaska and joins the Pacific Ocean with the Arctic Ocean; during the ice ages a land bridge across it is believed to have carried the first human migrations into the Americas.

Africa is the only continent through which all four of these lines pass: the Equator crosses its middle, the Tropic of Cancer runs across the Sahara, the Tropic of Capricorn crosses its southern part, and the Prime Meridian passes through its western bulge near Accra.

In that year the International Hydrographic Organization recognised the waters surrounding Antarctica, broadly south of sixty degrees south latitude, as the fifth ocean of the world, which is why older textbooks speak of four oceans and newer ones of five.

It takes its name from India, whose peninsula projects into it, and this is the only case of an ocean named after a nation; it is also unusual in being closed in the north by the Asian landmass, which makes its monsoon-driven currents reverse twice a year.

The Mariana Trench lies in the western Pacific Ocean, east of the Mariana Islands, and its southern end holds the Challenger Deep, close to eleven thousand metres below sea level, named after the British survey ship that sounded it in the nineteenth century.

It is the largest ocean, covering nearly half the total ocean surface, and the deepest, because the Challenger Deep in its Mariana Trench is the deepest known point on earth; its rim of volcanoes and earthquake zones is called the Ring of Fire.

By area the order of the continents is Asia, about 44 million square kilometres, then Africa with about 30 million, North America with about 24 million, South America with about 18 million, Antarctica with about 14 million, Europe with about 10 million and Australia with about 8 million.

India touches China through Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, and Nagaland is not on that boundary; its international border is with Myanmar.

Gairsain, in the Chamoli district of the Garhwal hills, was declared the summer capital of Uttarakhand, a long-standing demand of the hill districts, which held that a capital in the plains at Dehradun left them neglected.

Itanagar, named after the Ita fort in the area, became the capital when Arunachal Pradesh was a Union territory and continued as the capital after it became a State in 1987.

Uttar Pradesh touches eight States, namely Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, and in addition the Union territory of Delhi, which is the largest number for any State.

The McMahon Line was drawn at the Simla Convention of 1914 and is the boundary India recognises with China in the eastern sector, running along the crest of the hills north of Arunachal Pradesh.

Gujarat has the longest coastline of any Indian State, because its shore runs along the Gulf of Kachchh, the Saurashtra peninsula and the Gulf of Khambhat, which gives it a deeply indented outline and many ports, including Kandla and Mundra.

India shares its boundary with Myanmar through four States, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram, and Assam is not among them, because it is shut off from Myanmar by Nagaland and Manipur.