Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 85

This is the overall literacy rate the Census of 2011 reported for India, the figure used in textbooks and exam papers.

All three rivers join the Yamuna, the longest tributary of the Ganga, which rises at the Yamunotri glacier in Uttarakhand and meets the Ganga at Prayagraj.

Geology is the science of the solid Earth: the rocks it is made of, how it formed and changed over time, and the minerals, coal, oil and gas found inside it.

Both pairs are reversed: in Punjab rice is a commercial crop, while in Odisha it is a subsistence crop. The same crop can be commercial in one state and subsistence in another; it depends on why the farmer grows it.

That is exactly what the Indian monsoon is. The word monsoon comes from the Arabic mausim, meaning season, and describes winds that reverse direction with the season.

Tsomgo Lake, also called Changu Lake, lies in East Sikkim, about 40 km from Gangtok on the road to Nathu La.

When rivers leave the Himalayas and reach the plains, their speed drops suddenly and they drop the heaviest load first, pebbles and boulders, in the Bhabar belt.

Going south from Gulbarga you first cross the Krishna and then reach the Tungabhadra, on whose south bank Hampi stands.

All three statements are true. Statement 1: the size of an eruption is rated on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, a scale from 0 to 8 based on the volume of material thrown out and the height of the eruption column; each step up means roughly ten times more material.

The Tropic of Cancer crosses eight Indian states, and only two of them touch the sea. Running at about 23.5 degrees north, it passes from west to east through Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tripura and Mizoram.

The Sun is overhead, with its rays vertical at noon, only at places between the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees N) and the Tropic of Capricorn (23.5 degrees S).

The Coriolis force is the apparent force caused by the rotation of the Earth that deflects moving air and water to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere.

Western disturbances are low-pressure systems that originate over the Mediterranean Sea and travel eastward with the subtropical westerly jet stream in winter, bringing light rain to Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, and snow to the Himalaya, between December and February.

Precipitation is any form of water, liquid or solid, that falls from clouds to the ground. When the temperature is above freezing it falls as rain or drizzle; below freezing, water vapour turns directly into ice crystals that fall as snow.

The Beas rises at Beas Kund near the Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh, flows past Manali, Kullu and Mandi, enters Punjab and meets the Satluj at Harike in Punjab, where the Harike barrage and wetland stand.

Ganymede is one of the four large moons of Jupiter first seen by Galileo, the others being Io, Europa and Callisto, and it is larger than the planet Mercury, which makes it the biggest satellite in the solar system.

On 21 June the northern hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, whose rays fall vertically on the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north.

In that year the International Astronomical Union adopted a formal definition of a planet: a body that orbits the Sun, is massive enough for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

The Moon is on average about 384,400 kilometres from the Earth. Light covers about three lakh kilometres in a second, so it crosses that distance in a little over a second.

The asteroid belt is a broad band of rocky bodies, from dust-sized grains to bodies hundreds of kilometres across, going round the Sun between the orbit of Mars and that of Jupiter.