Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 70

Sheet erosion peels a thin, even film of topsoil off a whole slope, leaving no channel or scar behind, so a farmer may not notice it for years while fertility quietly drains away.

Salinity is the quantity of dissolved salt, in grams, present in one thousand grams of sea water, so it is read as parts per thousand.

In Koppen’s classification the group of cold climates, marked E, holds two types, the tundra climate and the ice cap climate.

Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh has a large coal based thermal power station on the Krishna river, named after Dr Narla Tata Rao, but no nuclear plant.

India's first jute mill was set up at Rishra, on the bank of the Hooghly near Serampore in Bengal, in 1855 by George Auckland.

Odisha is the largest producer of bauxite in India and accounts for more than half of the country's output.

Hogenakkal Falls lies on the river Kaveri in the Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu, close to the border with Karnataka.

The National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, an institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, works from Nagpur and prepares the soil maps and land capability surveys on which district planning rests.

Running water cuts gullies in the soft alluvium of the Chambal basin, and where those gullies deepen and spread over a wide tract the land becomes a maze of steep channels and ridges unfit for cultivation, which geographers call badland and local people call the ravines or beehad.

Gypsum, that is calcium sulphate, supplies calcium that replaces the sodium held on the soil particles, and once the sodium is set free it can be washed out of the field by irrigation and drainage, restoring structure to land that had become hard and impermeable.

Laterite soil forms on hill slopes of Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and Assam under heavy rain and high temperature, and after manuring it carries these plantation crops well; cashew in particular does well on the laterite of the Kerala and Karnataka coast.

Bhangar is the older alluvium of the northern plains, lying above the flood level on slightly raised terraces, coarser in texture and marked by nodules of calcium carbonate known as kankar, which lower its fertility and hinder the movement of water.

Black soil, called regur, formed from the lava of the Deccan trap and is so closely tied to this one crop that it is popularly called black cotton soil.

Fertility needs mineral nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from the weathered rock, and organic matter, that is humus from decayed plants and animals, which holds water, feeds soil organisms and releases nutrients slowly.

Weathering is the natural breaking down of rock by temperature, water, wind and living things, and it is the process that makes soil in the first place; it is not a technique that a farmer applies to save soil, so it cannot be a conservation method.

In sheet erosion water spreads over a wide slope and carries away a thin, even film of topsoil, so nothing obvious is left behind to see, and the loss is noticed only years later as falling yields.

What it is rich in is calcium carbonate, magnesium, potash and lime, and remembering that short list is the safest way to answer any statement question on this soil.

A delta is built out of silt that a river carries down and drops where it meets the sea, so deltaic land is alluvial by definition, and the eastern coastal deltas of the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri are among the most fertile rice tracts of the country.

Sambhar lies west of Jaipur in a shallow depression with no outlet to the sea; water that flows in can only evaporate, leaving behind the salt that has made the lake a major source of common salt for centuries.

Bhakra is built across the Sutlej at the Bhakra gorge on the border of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, is the highest straight gravity dam in India, and the lake it holds is named Gobind Sagar after Guru Gobind Singh.