Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 79

This is the average rate at which air temperature falls as one rises through the troposphere, and it explains why hill stations are cooler than the plains and why high peaks carry snow even in the tropics.

Ozone is concentrated in the lower and middle stratosphere, and because it absorbs ultraviolet radiation the temperature of this layer rises with height instead of falling.

Basic lava is poor in silica, very hot and thin, so it travels a long way from the vent before it solidifies.

The circum-Pacific belt, popularly called the Ring of Fire, runs from the Andes of South America up through Mexico, the western coast of North America and the Aleutians, then down through Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia to New Zealand.

P waves are longitudinal, moving the particles of the medium back and forth along the direction of travel by compression and rarefaction.

Stromboli is a small island volcano in the Lipari or Aeolian group north of Sicily, and it has been in almost continuous mild eruption for centuries.

Mount Vesuvius stands near the Bay of Naples in southern Italy and its eruption in 79 CE buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash, preserving them so well that they became an archaeological record of Roman daily life.

A seismograph carries a mass that stays nearly still while the ground and the frame move under it, and the relative motion is traced as a wavy line.

Barren Island lies in the Andaman Sea, to the east of the main Andaman group, and is the only active volcano in India and in South Asia.

The Richter scale, devised by Charles F. Richter in 1935, expresses the energy released at the source of the shock.

The focus, also called the hypocentre, is the point below the surface at which the strained rock ruptures and releases its stored elastic energy as seismic waves.

Secondary or S waves are transverse, so the particles of the medium move at right angles to the direction of travel.

The polar easterlies blow out of the high pressure belts over the poles towards the sub-polar low pressure belts, so they carry extremely cold and dry air.

El Nino is the warming of the surface water of the central and eastern Pacific, and it weakens the trade winds that normally blow from east to west across that ocean.

Hiralal Chaudhuri is called the father of the Blue Revolution, the sharp rise in India's fish production.

Kaal Baisakhi is the name used in West Bengal for the violent evening thunderstorms of the pre-monsoon months. They strike in April and May, the Bengali month of Baishakh, with squalls, thunder, lightning and sometimes hail, which is why the name means the calamity of Baishakh.

Dang is not a South Indian tribe. The name belongs to the Dangs district of southern Gujarat, whose tribal people are mainly Bhil, Warli and Konkana, all of western India.

Mercury is a terrestrial planet, not a Jovian one. The eight planets fall into two groups.

A tide is the regular rise and fall of sea level caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon and, to a smaller extent, the Sun, together with the centrifugal force of the spinning earth.

P waves, or primary waves, are longitudinal: the particles of the medium move back and forth along the same direction in which the wave travels, squeezing and stretching the rock like a sound wave.