Geography Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 39

The calm centre of a cyclone is called the eye of the storm, a roughly circular area twenty to fifty kilometres across where the air sinks, the winds are light and the sky can even be clear.

In the mesosphere the temperature falls as one goes up, reaching about minus 100 degrees Celsius at the mesopause near 80 km, which makes it the coldest layer of the atmosphere.

Calderas are the most explosive of the earth's volcanoes, because they erupt so violently that the magma chamber empties and the summit collapses into a wide hollow instead of building a cone.

The Bureau of Indian Standards code IS 1893 divides the country into four seismic zones, numbered II, III, IV and V, where Zone V carries the highest risk and Zone II the least.

In the continental drift theory that Alfred Wegener put forward in 1912, the single land mass was Pangaea and the single mega ocean around it was Panthalassa, a Greek name meaning all sea.

The Tropic of Capricorn runs at about 23.5 degrees south and misses Uruguay, which lies further south between roughly 30 and 35 degrees.

In intercropping two or more crops are grown together on the same field at the same time, but sown in a definite pattern of rows, such as a few rows of soyabean between rows of maize, or bajra with lobia.

Ahmedabad is a very large cotton textile centre and is called the Manchester of India, but it is not the largest in the country; that place belongs to Mumbai, the old Cottonopolis, which grew first because of its port, its mills and its capital, and Maharashtra remains ahead of Gujarat…

Marble is a non-metallic mineral: no metal can be drawn out of it, and it is used as a building and sculpting stone, the Makrana marble of Rajasthan being the stone of the Taj Mahal.

The intensity of an earthquake is measured on the Modified Mercalli scale, whose grades run from I to XII.

Zoji La, usually written Zojila, is the pass on the Srinagar–Kargil–Leh highway at about 3,528 metres in the Zanskar range, and it is the only road link between the Kashmir valley and Ladakh.

Jog Falls is formed by the Sharavathi river where it drops off the edge of the Western Ghats in the Shivamogga district of Karnataka, and it falls in four separate streams traditionally named Raja, Rani, Rocket and Roarer.

Laterite soil is rich in oxides of iron and aluminium, and the iron oxide gives it its red brick colour.

These are called monsoon forests because they grow where rainfall comes with the monsoon, between about 70 and 200 centimetres a year, and the trees shed their leaves for six to eight weeks in the dry season to save water.

The Sutlej rises from the Rakas lake near Mansarovar in Tibet, where it is called the Langchen Khambab, and enters India through the Shipki La pass in Himachal Pradesh before flowing on to join the Beas at Harike.

The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Station stands on the coast of the Gulf of Mannar in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu.

Cotton is a kharif crop: it is sown with the first showers of the south-west monsoon in June and July and picked from September onwards, because it needs high temperature, light rain and a long frost-free spell.

The Sharavati river in Karnataka falls from a height of about 253 metres as Jog Falls, which is also called Gerusoppa Falls after the village nearby, and Jogada Gundi in the local tongue.

The Planning Commission divided India into 15 agro-climatic zones in 1989, so that farm planning could follow soil, climate, rainfall and water resources rather than State boundaries.

Sikkim does not touch Myanmar. Its neighbours across the border are Nepal to the west, China in the north and east, and Bhutan to the south-east.