Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 77

The bay narrows and shallows inland, so the incoming tidal wave is funnelled into a smaller and smaller cross-section and its height is greatly magnified, giving the greatest difference between high and low water anywhere on earth.

Spring tides occur at new moon and at full moon, when the sun, the earth and the moon lie in a straight line, a position called syzygy.

Textbooks describing the distribution of water on earth give about 97.2 per cent as ocean water, roughly 2 per cent locked in ice caps and glaciers, and well under 1 per cent as groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture and water vapour together.

The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped belt running around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, from the Andes up the west coast of the Americas, across the Aleutians and down through Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia to New Zealand.

El Nino, Spanish for the child, is the warm surface water that appears off the coast of Peru and Ecuador around Christmas in some years, replacing the normally cold Peru or Humboldt current.

It is a warm current of the Indian Ocean that flows southward along the eastern coast of southern Africa, carrying tropical water towards the Cape before most of it turns back into the Indian Ocean.

El Nino is the periodic warming of the surface water of the central and eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, and the name, meaning the child, was given by fishermen because it appears around Christmas.

These are low pressure systems, that is temperate cyclones, which form over the Mediterranean and the Caspian region and travel eastwards with the westerly jet stream.

These are the violent evening thunderstorms of the months before the monsoon in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, and the name means the calamity of the month of Baisakh because the squalls can flatten huts and trees.

Mawsynram lies in the Khasi hills, and the neighbouring Cherrapunji, now called Sohra, stands close behind it.

The south-west monsoon normally sets in over the Kerala coast about the first of June, and the sudden heavy downpour that marks its arrival is called the burst of the monsoon.

In the Koeppen classification as applied to India, the semi-arid steppe climate marked BShw covers parts of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and the drier interior of the peninsula, where rainfall is low but not as low as in a true desert.

An isohyet is a line drawn on a map through all the places that receive the same amount of rainfall in a given period.

The monsoon trough is the belt of low pressure that lies across the northern plains during the rainy season and guides the depressions that bring rain.

The pre-monsoon thundery showers of Karnataka are called cherry blossom showers or blossom showers because they help the coffee plants of the Kodagu, Chikkamagaluru and Hassan belt to flower.

As the monsoon retreats in October and November the wind direction reverses and air moves from the land towards the sea.

The Blue Revolution means the rapid rise in fish production, so it belongs to pisciculture, the rearing of fish. In India it began with the Fish Farmers Development Agency set up in the early 1970s, and Dr Hiralal Chaudhuri, who worked out induced breeding in carp, is called its father.

The loo is a hot, dry wind that blows over the plains of north India and Pakistan in May and June, often pushing afternoon temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius and causing heat strokes.

Milpa is the name given to shifting cultivation in Mexico and in the neighbouring parts of Central America, where maize, beans and squash are grown together on a patch cleared from the forest.

The Sharavati river in Karnataka falls from a height of about 253 metres as Jog Falls, which is also called Gerusoppa Falls after the village nearby, and Jogada Gundi in the local tongue.