Geography Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 20

The Census of 2011 puts the average annual exponential growth rate of India's population for the decade 2001 to 2011 at 1.64 per cent.

Marble is a metamorphic rock, formed when limestone is changed deep inside the earth by great heat and pressure; the Taj Mahal is built of it.

Granite is an igneous rock, not a sedimentary one. It forms when magma cools slowly deep inside the crust, so its crystals of quartz, feldspar and mica are large enough to see; because it cooled below the surface it is called an intrusive or plutonic rock.

Pulicat Lake lies across the boundary of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, with the larger share in Andhra Pradesh, and is the second largest brackish-water lagoon in India after Chilika.

Kharif crops are the monsoon crops: they are sown with the onset of the south-west monsoon in June and July and harvested in September and October, when the rains withdraw.

Only sedimentary rocks preserve fossils, because they are built up layer by layer from sediment that settles in water or on land.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Granite forms when magma cools slowly deep inside the crust, so it is an intrusive, or plutonic, igneous rock. The slow cooling lets large crystals of quartz, feldspar and mica grow, which is why granite has a coarse, grainy look you can see with the naked eye.

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.

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