Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 72

Water erosion of soil moves through a fixed sequence: raindrops first loosen the soil, that is splash erosion; the water then takes off a thin even layer of topsoil, which is sheet erosion; the flow soon gathers into small finger-like channels called rills; and when those rills are cut deeper…

Zoji La, usually written Zojila, is the pass on the Srinagar–Kargil–Leh highway at about 3,528 metres in the Zanskar range, and it is the only road link between the Kashmir valley and Ladakh.

The Orient Express ran from Paris in France to Istanbul in Turkey, crossing Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia, so almost the whole of its roughly 3,000 km line lay inside Europe.

Tropical evergreen forests need more than 200 cm of annual rainfall with a short dry season, and in India the western slopes of the Western Ghats get exactly that from the south-west monsoon.

Minerals that are washed out of their parent rock and settle in the sand and gravel of a river bed, flood plain or valley floor are called placer deposits.

Rajasthan supplies most of India's gypsum and almost all of its silver ore.

Shifting agriculture is called jhoom or jhum cultivation in India, especially in the north eastern hills. In this method a patch of forest is cleared and burnt, and the ash left behind manures the soil.

The Kolar Gold Fields lie in the Kolar district of Karnataka, on the Dharwar rocks of the peninsular plateau. Kolar was for a long time India's main source of gold and one of the deepest mines in the world, going down about three kilometres.

A line of trees or tall shrubs works as a windbreak: it slows the wind close to the ground so the moving air can no longer lift loose soil.

The Irula, also written Irular, are one of the main tribal communities of Tamil Nadu and live mostly in the Nilgiri hills and in the districts along the border with Kerala.

The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 with the World Bank as a party to the arrangement, gave India the unrestricted use of the three eastern rivers, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej, and gave the three western rivers to Pakistan, with India allowed limited uses such as run…

At Devprayag in Uttarakhand the Bhagirathi, which comes down from the Gangotri glacier, meets the Alaknanda, and the united stream is called the Ganga from that point.

Hirakud dam stands on the Mahanadi in the Sambalpur district of Odisha and is among the longest earthen dams in the world, built for flood control, irrigation and power in a basin that used to flood badly.

The Narmada flows west from the Amarkantak plateau through the rift valley between the Vindhya and Satpura ranges and empties into the Gulf of Khambhat through an estuary, because the steep, narrow valley lets it carry its silt straight out to sea instead of spreading it.

The Godavari rises in the Western Ghats at Trimbakeshwar in the Nashik district of Maharashtra and flows east across the peninsula to the Bay of Bengal, draining the second largest basin in India after the Ganga.

The Godavari is about 1,465 kilometres long, rises at Trimbakeshwar near Nashik in Maharashtra, crosses Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh and falls into the Bay of Bengal, all within India, which makes it the longest river flowing wholly inside the country.

The Musi rises in the Anantagiri hills of Telangana, flows through Hyderabad, and joins the Krishna in Nalgonda district, which is why the city's water supply and floods are tied to it.

In the Rigveda the Ravi appears as the Parushni, and it is on this river that the Battle of the Ten Kings, the Dasarajna, is placed.

The Sutlej rises from the Rakas lake near Mansarovar in Tibet, where it is called the Langchen Khambab, and enters India through the Shipki La pass in Himachal Pradesh before flowing on to join the Beas at Harike.

The Tons is a tributary of the Yamuna in the Ganga system, rising in the Garhwal Himalaya, and has nothing to do with the Brahmaputra basin.