Geography Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 24

The Mohorovicic discontinuity, or Moho, is the boundary between the crust and the mantle, where seismic waves suddenly speed up.

All three statements describe India's two coasts correctly: the west is high, rocky and erosional, the east is low and depositional.

Evaporation is the escape of molecules from a liquid surface into the air, and it slows as the air above fills with vapour; when the humidity falls the air can hold more vapour, so the rate of evaporation rises.

High clouds such as cirrus are thin and made of ice crystals; they let most of the sunlight pass through but absorb the outgoing infrared radiation from the surface, so their net effect is to warm.

Geyserite is a chemically formed sedimentary rock: it is silica that comes out of solution from hot spring and geyser water and is deposited around the vent.

The pull of the Sun and Moon raises the tides, the regular rise and fall of the sea, but it is not counted among the forces that drive ocean currents.

Olericulture is the branch of horticulture that deals with vegetables, covering their production in the field, their storage, their processing and their marketing, and it is the branch on which market gardening and truck farming rest.

Manikaran in the Parvati valley of Kullu district has natural hot springs, and India set up an experimental geothermal project there.

In the standard division of India's population history, the three decades from 1921 to 1951 are called the period of steady population growth.

Bermuda is a small group of islands in the western North Atlantic, about 1,000 km east of the coast of North Carolina in the USA.

In Köppen's scheme it stands for a hot desert climate with its little rain in summer, which fits western Rajasthan.

A strong solar storm disturbs the Earth's magnetic field and upper atmosphere, which hits electrical and radio systems, but it cannot cause tsunamis or forest fires.

Monazite is a phosphate mineral rich in rare earths and thorium, it occurs only in certain stretches of India's beach sands, and only government bodies may handle it.

Of the Central Asian countries listed, only Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan touch Afghanistan, all along its northern edge.

The Levant is the land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia. The word comes from the French 'lever', to rise, meaning the land where the sun rises, as seen from Europe.

Nanda Devi belongs to the Kumaon Himalaya, but Namcha Barwa and Nokrek are wrongly placed. Nanda Devi (7,816 m) is the highest peak lying wholly within India and the highest in Uttarakhand.

The Pennar river cut the Gandikota gorge through the Erramala hills in the Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh. Gandikota is often called the Grand Canyon of India.

The crust is the outermost and thinnest layer of the earth and is of two kinds. The continental crust, made largely of lighter granitic rock rich in silica and aluminium, averages about thirty kilometres in thickness and reaches about seventy kilometres under young fold mountains such as the Himalaya.

Plate tectonics, propounded in 1967, holds that the lithosphere is broken into seven major plates and a number of minor ones that move over the plastic asthenosphere.

Lake Faguibine in northern Mali, once one of the largest lakes of West Africa, has dried up and turned into desert.