Geography Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 35

The Steppes are the temperate grasslands of Eurasia, stretching across Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan; the Prairies cover the central plains of the United States and Canada; the Velds are the grassy plateaus of South Africa; and the Downs are the grasslands of south-eastern Australia, famous for sheep rearing and merino…

Kolkata is the only major port of India built on a river, the Hooghly, about 200 km upstream from the sea.

The Sutlej feeds the Indus, the Kosi the Ganga, the Teesta the Brahmaputra and the Chambal the Yamuna.

When a river cuts across the narrow neck of a loop and silt seals both ends, the old loop is left behind as a curved lake.

Black cotton soil, or regur, formed from the weathering of the Deccan Trap basalt, lava that poured out through long cracks in the crust about 65 million years ago.

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.

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.

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.

Quartzite is formed when sandstone, a sedimentary rock, is changed by great heat and pressure deep inside the earth.

Indira Point on Great Nicobar Island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is the southernmost point of Indian territory, at about 6 degrees 45 minutes north latitude.

The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, not the Black Sea. The Volga, about 3,530 km long, is the longest river in Europe.

Most of Central Asia speaks Turkic languages, which are traditionally grouped in the Altaic family. Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen, the main languages of four of the five Central Asian republics, are Turkic.

Lonar was formed by a meteorite impact, and its rocks contain maskelynite, a natural glass that forms only under such high-velocity impacts and is also found in lunar rocks.

All three projects, Baglihar, Dulhasti and Salal, stand on the Chenab river in Jammu and Kashmir. The Chenab is formed by the Chandra and Bhaga rivers, which meet at Tandi in Himachal Pradesh, and it flows through Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan.

The Caucasus Mountains stretch from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, across Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

A cirque is carved by a glacier, not by a river, so it is not a fluvial landform. Fluvial landforms are those shaped by running water.

The mistral is a cold, dry northerly wind that blows from the Alps down the Rhone valley of France to the Mediterranean coast.

In the Hadley cell, air rises near the equator and sinks at about 30 degrees latitude, in the subtropical high-pressure belts.

Belarus is a landlocked country in eastern Europe, far south of the Arctic, so it has no tundra. Tundra vegetation grows beyond the tree line, mainly north of the Arctic Circle, where summers are short and cool and the subsoil stays frozen as permafrost.

Both the North Atlantic Drift and the Brazil Current carry warm water from low latitudes towards higher latitudes. As a rule, currents that flow from the equator towards the poles are warm, and those that flow from the poles towards the equator are cold.