Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 68

When industries gather at one urban centre, each of them can use the roads, railways, power lines, water supply, banks, insurance offices, skilled workers, component suppliers and repair workshops that the others have brought into being, and the saving in cost that follows from this sharing is called an agglomeration…

Ahmedabad is a very large cotton textile centre and is called the Manchester of India, but it is not the largest in the country; that place belongs to Mumbai, the old Cottonopolis, which grew first because of its port, its mills and its capital, and Maharashtra remains ahead of Gujarat…

The Puga valley in Ladakh, with its hot springs and steam vents, is one of the two geothermal fields named in Indian geography, the other being Manikaran in the Parvati valley of Himachal Pradesh.

The beach sands of the Kerala coast, and the neighbouring coast of Tamil Nadu, are rich in monazite, from which thorium is obtained, along with ilmenite and other heavy minerals.

The Tarapur station on the Konkan coast north of Mumbai was the first nuclear power station to generate electricity in India, and it remains a working station.

Jaduguda in the Singhbhum region of Jharkhand is the oldest uranium mine in India, and the ore from it feeds the plants that make fuel for the country's pressurised heavy water reactors.

Oil was struck at Digboi in the upper Assam valley in the nineteenth century, the first successful well in India, and the refinery built beside it is the oldest working refinery in the country.

The Koderma and Gaya belt, spread over Jharkhand and Bihar, is the richest mica producing area of India, and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh and the Ajmer region of Rajasthan follow it.

The Khetri belt in the Jhunjhunu region of Rajasthan is one of India's main copper mining areas, the other being Malanjkhand in Madhya Pradesh, with Singhbhum in Jharkhand as the third.

The Panchpatmali plateau in the Koraput region of Odisha carries thick beds of bauxite, the ore from which aluminium is obtained, and the refinery and smelter complexes of the region were built to use it.

Magnetite is the finest quality of iron ore, black in colour, with excellent magnetic properties, which is why it is valued in the electrical industry as well as in steel making.

The Bailadila range in the Dantewada region of southern Chhattisgarh holds high grade haematite, and its ore has long been carried by a dedicated line to the port of Visakhapatnam for export as well as to the steel plants of the region.

The Neyveli field in the Cuddalore region of Tamil Nadu is the country's best known lignite mine, worked by open cast methods, and the thermal stations built beside it burn the lignite where it is dug because this soft brown coal is not worth carrying far.

It is the hardest and most lustrous coal, holds the highest percentage of carbon, gives the greatest heat and burns almost without smoke.

Insolation is the incoming solar radiation actually received by a unit area of the earth's surface, and how much of it a place receives decides how warm that place becomes.

It was founded in 1929 as the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research on the recommendation of the Royal Commission on Agriculture, has its headquarters at New Delhi and coordinates research, education and extension through a national network of institutes and agricultural universities.

Plantation agriculture is a type of commercial farming in which one crop such as tea, coffee, rubber, sugarcane or banana is grown over a large area with hired labour, capital investment and a processing unit on or near the estate.

Pulses are leguminous plants whose roots carry nodules containing Rhizobium bacteria. These bacteria convert nitrogen from the air into compounds the plant can use, and part of that nitrogen stays in the soil after harvest, so the cereal that follows needs less fertiliser.

Operation Flood was the dairy development programme of the National Dairy Development Board that linked village milk producers' cooperatives to city markets and made India the largest milk producer in the world.

Jute is called the golden fibre because of its shining golden brown colour and the high export value it once commanded.