Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 69

Podu is the local name for slash and burn or shifting cultivation in Andhra Pradesh, where a patch of forest is cleared, burnt and cropped for a few years and then left to recover while the cultivator moves to a fresh patch.

Black soil, also called regur or black cotton soil, covers much of the Deccan plateau and is formed from the weathering of lava.

The pink bollworm is the most damaging pest of the cotton plant.

In the colour coding of India's agricultural revolutions the Silver Fibre Revolution stands for cotton, the fibre crop of the black soil regions of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Telangana.

Both are sown in October and November after the monsoon withdraws and harvested in March and April. Barley is a coarse cereal grown mainly in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, and gram is the most important rabi pulse of India, grown in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

Wheat is the leading rabi crop of India. It is sown in October and November, needs a cool season of about fifty to sixty centimetres of rainfall for growth and bright sunshine at the time of ripening, and is harvested in March and April.

Kharif crops are sown in June and July with the onset of the south-west monsoon and harvested in September and October, because they need both high temperature and heavy rainfall while growing.

Tropical thorn forest and scrub is the natural vegetation of the semi-arid belt that runs through Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, south-western Punjab, western Madhya Pradesh and parts of the Deccan interior, where rainfall falls short of 70 centimetres.

Sholas are small, dense, stunted evergreen forests that survive in the sheltered valleys and folds of the high hills of the Western Ghats above about 1,500 metres, and they alternate with rolling grassland to form the shola grassland mosaic, a habitat of the Nilgiri tahr.

It works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has its headquarters at Dehradun, maps the forest and tree cover of the country with satellite imagery and field checks, and brings out the India State of Forest Report once every two years.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 fixed the goal of keeping about one-third of the total land area of the country under forest, with a larger share in the hills and mountains, where slopes need tree cover to hold the soil, and a smaller share in the plains.

Harry Champion and S. K. Seth revised the earlier survey of Indian forest types in 1968 and grouped the forests into major groups such as moist tropical, dry tropical, montane subtropical, montane temperate, sub-alpine and alpine, each divided further into types, using the climatic controls of rainfall, humidity and temperature.

Mangroves grow in the salty, waterlogged mud of deltas and creeks, where the soil holds almost no oxygen, so the roots send up narrow pegs called pneumatophores above the mud surface to breathe, and many species also stand on arching stilt roots for support in the soft ground.

The sundari, whose botanical name is Heritiera fomes, is the dominant mangrove of the Ganga and Brahmaputra delta and gives the Sundarbans its name; its timber is hard and was long used for boats and posts.

These forests grow where annual rainfall exceeds 200 centimetres, on the windward western slopes of the Western Ghats, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in upper Assam and along the hills of the north-east.

Melocanna baccifera, the muli bamboo, covers large tracts of Mizoram and the neighbouring hills and flowers only once in about half a century, after which the whole stand dies.

Indian forests are classified administratively into reserved, protected and unclassed forests, and the first two together are described as the permanent forest estate, that is land maintained permanently for timber and other forest produce and for the protection of soil and water.

Tropical deciduous forest is called monsoon forest because it is the natural vegetation of the monsoon climate, growing where rainfall lies between 70 and 200 centimetres and where a marked dry season follows the rains.

Red sanders, or red sandalwood, is a tree of the dry deciduous forest and grows almost entirely in the Seshachalam and Palakonda hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh, where it is prized for its dark red heartwood; it is not a thorn forest species.

Every kilogram of sea water carries about 35 grams of dissolved salts, written as 35 parts per thousand, and roughly 27 of those grams are common salt, sodium chloride.