Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 78

The Planning Commission divided India into 15 agro-climatic zones in 1989, so that farm planning could follow soil, climate, rainfall and water resources rather than State boundaries.

Air flows from where pressure is high to where it is low, and that moving air is what we call wind; the greater the difference in pressure, the stronger the wind.

Sikkim does not touch Myanmar. Its neighbours across the border are Nepal to the west, China in the north and east, and Bhutan to the south-east.

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock: grains of sand carried by rivers or wind settle in layers and harden over time.

The four inner or terrestrial planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Jupiter lies beyond the asteroid belt and is the first of the outer planets.

The Bansagar Dam stands on the Sone river in the Shahdol region of Madhya Pradesh. Bansagar is a joint project of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the three states through which the Sone flows, and it serves both irrigation and power.

The westerlies blow from the subtropical high pressure belt towards the subpolar low, which makes them south-westerly in the northern hemisphere and north-westerly in the southern.

Kalbaisakhi is the name given in West Bengal to the violent evening thunderstorms of the hot weather season, from March to May.

Zoji La, or the Zojila pass, lies in the Zanskar range of the Himalayas at a height of about 3,528 metres.

Sandstone forms when grains of sand carried by rivers, wind or waves settle in layers and are cemented together over long periods, which makes it a sedimentary rock.

The Tropic of Cancer, at 23 degrees 30 minutes north, cuts India almost in half and divides it into a tropical south and a subtropical north.

Saturn lies beyond the asteroid belt, so it is an outer planet. The eight planets are divided by the asteroid belt that runs between Mars and Jupiter.

In summer, as the subtropical westerly jet withdraws to the north of the plateau of Tibet, an easterly jet stream forms in the upper air over peninsular India and blows from east to west.

Strong heating at the equator makes the air expand and rise, so surface pressure is low and horizontal winds are weak; sailing ships were often becalmed there.

It is a cold, dry and often violent wind that blows from the north down the Rhone valley of southern France to the Gulf of Lion, chilling the coast and damaging crops, which is why orchards there are protected by lines of trees and walls.

It states the deflection produced by the rotation of the earth, the Coriolis effect, which turns every freely moving body to the right of its path in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern.

It is a strong, hot and dry wind that blows during the day over the plains of north India and Pakistan in the peak of summer, raising temperatures sharply and causing heat stroke, and it dies down after sunset.

The wind is the Chinook. It descends the leeward slope, is compressed and warmed as it sinks, and can raise the temperature sharply in a few hours; it melts or evaporates the snow cover, which is why herders call it the snow eater and why it is valued for exposing…

It is comparatively inert, so it dilutes oxygen and slows combustion, and it enters living things mainly through the nitrogen cycle in which bacteria fix it in a usable form.

Although the air there is thin, it is dense enough to heat a body moving at cosmic speed by friction, so most meteors glow and are destroyed in this layer and are seen from the ground as shooting stars.