Geography GK Questions with Answers – Page 86

Saturn is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium spread over an enormous volume, and its average density is less than that of water.

The axis of the Earth is tilted about 23.5 degrees from the vertical and keeps pointing in the same direction throughout the year.

Almost every planet, the Earth included, rotates from west to east, which is why the Sun appears to rise in the east.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest of all by both diameter and mass; it is a gas giant of hydrogen and helium.

The Sun is about 149.6 million kilometres from the Earth, a distance called one astronomical unit, and light travels about three lakh kilometres in a second.

Venus is wrapped in a very thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which lets sunlight in but does not let the heat escape.

The Son rises at Amarkantak on the Maikal hills in Anuppur district of Madhya Pradesh, the same plateau from which the Narmada starts in the opposite direction.

The Kishanganga rises near Gurez in the Kashmir valley, flows north-west through Bandipora, crosses the Line of Control, where it is called the Neelum, and joins the Jhelum at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The Mahananda rises in the Darjeeling hills of West Bengal, near Kurseong, at a height of about 2,100 metres. It flows down through Siliguri, enters Bihar near Kishanganj, and then passes into Bangladesh, where it joins the Ganga (called the Padma there).

The Arabian Sea branch of the southwest monsoon strikes the Western Ghats first and drops most of its moisture on the windward western slopes, so the land on the eastern, leeward side gets little rain.

Nepal touches five Indian states: Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim. Manipur lies far to the east in the North-East and shares its international border only with Myanmar.

The Deccan plateau is the large triangular block of the Peninsular plateau south of the Narmada, bounded by the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in the north, the Western Ghats in the west and the Eastern Ghats in the east, with an average height of about 600 metres.

The Krishna rises near Mahabaleshwar in the Satara district of Maharashtra, at about 1,337 metres in the Sahyadri, which is the local name of the Western Ghats.

The Lushai Hills are the old British name for the hills of present-day Mizoram, home of the Mizo (Lushai) people.

The Malwa plateau lies in western Madhya Pradesh and south-eastern Rajasthan, between the Vindhyas in the south and the Aravallis in the north-west, and is made of Deccan lava with black soil.

Vembanad in Kerala is the longest lake in India, stretching about 96 km from Alappuzha to Kochi, and it is also the largest lake of Kerala.

The Shevaroy Hills, also spelt Servarayan, rise near Salem in Tamil Nadu and are part of the Eastern Ghats.

The Wardha rises in the Satpura range near Multai in the Betul district of Madhya Pradesh, flows south-east through Vidarbha and meets the Wainganga; the combined stream is called the Pranhita, which is the largest tributary of the Godavari and joins it at Kaleshwaram in Telangana.

Aner, Panzara and Waghur all join the Tapi in the Khandesh region of northern Maharashtra, along with the Purna, Girna and Bori.

The Ganga basin is the most populous river basin on earth, home to more than 600 million people across India, Nepal, Bangladesh and a small part of Tibet.