Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 65

It is the only census year in which the population of India actually declined, the cause being the influenza epidemic of 1918 along with famine and outbreaks of plague and cholera.

The correct answer is B, Sikkim, whose population in Census 2011 was about 6.1 lakh, the smallest of any state; among the union territories the smallest was Lakshadweep with about 64,000 people.

The correct answer is A, Kerala, with a literacy rate of 93.91 per cent, the highest among the states, the result of a long history of schooling, missionary and princely state education and high female literacy.

The correct answer is C, Arunachal Pradesh, which recorded only 17 persons per square kilometre, the lowest among the states, because most of its area is steep mountain and dense forest with very little cultivable land.

The reason is the combination of fertile alluvial soil, assured water from the Ganga and its tributaries and a largely rural population living in closely spaced villages.

Census 2011 recorded an overall literacy rate of 74.04 per cent, made up of 82.14 per cent among males and 65.46 per cent among females, the gap of nearly seventeen percentage points being a favourite point for questions.

Census 2011 recorded an overall sex ratio of 943, an improvement over 933 in 2001, while the child sex ratio in the age group of nought to six years fell to 919 girls per 1,000 boys, the lowest recorded since independence.

Census 2011 counted 1,210.8 million people, that is about 121 crore, of whom roughly 62.37 crore were males and 58.65 crore females, giving India about 17.5 per cent of the world's population on about 2.4 per cent of its land area.

The census of 1881, taken during the viceroyalty of Lord Ripon, was the first in which the whole country was enumerated with reference to a single date, and from that year the census has been held every ten years without a break.

In Census 2011 Haryana recorded a sex ratio of 879 females per 1,000 males, the lowest among all the states of India, against the national figure of 943; among the union territories the lowest was Daman and Diu.

It was opened in 1989 to take the container traffic that the old Mumbai docks could not handle and it carries the largest share of India's container trade, with the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor built to feed it.

The correct answer is B, Kolkata, where the first underground metro service in India opened in 1984 between Esplanade and Bhowanipore on the north to south line, and the Metro Railway of Kolkata is the only metro system that is run as a zone of the Indian Railways.

The correct answer is C, 1.676 metres, the Indian broad gauge, which carries almost all the traffic of the network and is the gauge to which the older lines have been converted under Project Unigauge.

The Golden Quadrilateral, the first phase of the National Highways Development Project, is a 5,846 kilometre ring of four and six lane highways joining the four metropolitan cities, and its purpose was to cut the time and cost of moving goods between the ports and the interior.

The correct answer is A, Visakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, a land-locked natural harbour sheltered by the Dolphin's Nose headland and the deepest of India's major ports, which is why it handles iron ore, crude oil and coal in large ships and houses a major naval base.

The correct answer is C, the Ganga, Bhagirathi and Hooghly, from Haldia in West Bengal to Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, about 1,620 kilometres, declared the first national waterway in 1986 and being deepened under the Jal Marg Vikas Project with terminals at Varanasi, Sahibganj and Haldia.

The correct answer is B, Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, which is the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway and has one of the longest railway platforms in the country.

Because the river silts up, the port needs continuous dredging and large ships are handled at the Haldia dock complex downstream.

The correct answer is C, NH-44, which runs from Srinagar to Kanyakumari over about 3,745 kilometres through Jammu, Delhi, Agra, Gwalior, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Madurai, and was formed by merging several older highways at the time of renumbering.

The train ran on 16 April 1853 over about 34 kilometres, pulled by three locomotives named Sahib, Sindh and Sultan, and the day is counted as the birth of the Indian Railways.