Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 64

Census 2011 put the rural sex ratio at 949 females per thousand males and the urban sex ratio at 929, while the figure for the country as a whole was 943, the highest since 1951.

The Roaring Forties are the strong westerly winds of the southern hemisphere between about 40 and 50 degrees south. They blow with such force because there is almost no land in that belt to slow them down, so sailing ships once used them on the route to Australia.

Mawat is the local name in Rajasthan and the neighbouring plains for the light winter rain brought by western disturbances.

Smallest to largest, Europe covers about 10.2 million square kilometres, Antarctica about 14 million, South America about 17.8 million and North America about 24.7 million.

The Pushkar valley in Ajmer district is the rose belt of Rajasthan, and its desi gulab is grown on a large scale for processing rather than for cut flowers.

Where air pressure is low the air rises, cools as it goes up and the moisture in it condenses, so low pressure brings cloudy skies and wet weather, while in a high pressure area the air sinks and warms, clouds do not form and the sky stays clear and sunny.

Earthquake waves fall into body waves, which travel through the interior of the Earth, and surface waves, which move along the surface, and the surface waves are called L waves, or long waves.

The Bureau of Indian Standards code IS 1893 divides the country into four seismic zones, numbered II, III, IV and V, where Zone V carries the highest risk and Zone II the least.

In the continental drift theory that Alfred Wegener put forward in 1912, the single land mass was Pangaea and the single mega ocean around it was Panthalassa, a Greek name meaning all sea.

The Earth turns through 360 degrees in 24 hours, so it covers 15 degrees of longitude in one hour, and each standard time zone is drawn one hour, that is 15 degrees, wide.

Dal Lake in Srinagar is called the jewel of Srinagar, because the houseboats, floating gardens and shikaras of the city sit on it.

The Sirki Waterfall lies near Pasighat in the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Campos are the tropical grasslands of the Brazilian highlands, the Pampas are the temperate grasslands of Argentina, the Downs are the temperate grasslands of south-east Australia, and the Llanos are the tropical grasslands of the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and Colombia.

The Yamuna rises from the Yamunotri glacier on the Bandarpunch range in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, so its source lies inside the Indian Himalayas.

Ooty, or Udhagamandalam, sits in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu at about 2,240 metres, but it lies close to the equator at roughly 11 degrees north, so its winter temperatures stay above freezing and it gets no snowfall.

Kolleru Lake lies in Andhra Pradesh, between the deltas of the Krishna and the Godavari, spread across the Eluru and West Godavari districts.

Tamil Nadu gets most of its rain from the north-east monsoon between October and December, which is why its rainy season comes when the rest of India is drying out.

The Godavari rises near Trimbakeshwar in the Nashik district of Maharashtra, in the Western Ghats, about 80 km from the Arabian Sea.

The Sabarmati rises in the Aravalli Range in the Udaipur district of Rajasthan, then flows south-west across Gujarat and empties into the Gulf of Khambhat in the Arabian Sea after a course of about 371 km.

The census is taken under the Census Act of 1948 by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs, and census is a Union subject so the responsibility is wholly that of the central government.