Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 66

The local time of 82 degrees 30 minutes east is taken as Indian Standard Time for the whole country. This meridian passes through Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh.

New oceanic crust is made at mid-ocean ridges, where magma rises, cools and is pushed outwards on both sides, and that process is called seafloor spreading.

The Inter Tropical Convergence Zone is the low-pressure belt near the equator where the north-east and the south-east trade winds meet.

An inselberg is an isolated residual hill that rises abruptly from a plain in a hot desert, so it is the work of weathering and wind in arid regions, not of glaciers.

Himachal Pradesh lies west of the Nepal border, so it touches China in the north but never Nepal. Five Indian states share a boundary with Nepal - Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim - and the border runs for about 1,751 kilometres.

Plate tectonics says the Earth's rigid outer shell is broken into plates that keep moving slowly, carried by convection currents in the mantle below.

Muri, a town in the Ranchi district of Jharkhand, has a large alumina refinery, so it is remembered as an aluminium centre.

India's annual rate of population growth reached its peak in the two decades from 1961 to 1981 and has fallen in every census decade since 1981, which is why demographers date the turn to that year.

Young fold mountains were raised in the Tertiary period, only a few tens of millions of years ago in geological time, so erosion has had little time to wear them down and many of them are still rising as the plates behind them keep pushing.

Cutting the vegetation on a slope makes landslides more likely, not less, so it can never be a mitigation measure.

The equator is the latitude of 0 degrees and it runs east to west round the middle of the earth, cutting the globe into two equal halves.

Uttar Pradesh grows more wheat than any other state, because the fertile alluvial soil of the Ganga plain, canal and tubewell irrigation and a cool winter together suit the crop.

The halocline is the layer in a vertical section of the ocean in which salinity changes sharply with depth; the name comes from the Greek halos, meaning salt.

An anticyclone is a system of high pressure, with the highest pressure at its centre, and the air there sinks from above.

The Coriolis effect is an apparent force produced by the rotation of the earth on its axis.

S waves are transverse and cannot pass through the liquid outer core, so a wide belt beyond about 103 degrees from the epicentre receives no S waves at all.

When layers of rock are squeezed by compression they bend, and a fold that arches upward is called an anticline.

Kandla, now named Deendayal Port, stands on the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat and is a tidal port, which means ships use the rise of the tide in its creek to come in and go out.

Vipasha is the Sanskrit name of the Beas, the river the Greeks called Hyphasis and the one at whose bank Alexander's army refused to march further east in 326 BC.

Mosses, lichens and low shrubs make up the tundra, the treeless cover of the lands around the Arctic Ocean and of high mountain slopes above the tree line.