Geography Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 44

Tobacco, cocoa and rubber all come from the Americas and spread to Asia, Africa and Europe after Columbus. The exchange of plants and animals between the Americas (New World) and Afro-Eurasia (Old World) after 1492 is called the Columbian Exchange.

21 June is the summer solstice of the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Pole is tilted towards the Sun and the whole Arctic Circle gets 24 hours of daylight.

Spring tides have the highest high tides and the lowest low tides, so the tidal range is at its greatest.

Nepal touches five Indian states, namely Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim, which is the largest number of States for any neighbour of India.

It runs for about eight hundred kilometres between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, joining the Andaman Sea with the South China Sea, and is the longest strait in the world as well as one of the busiest shipping lanes, carrying a large share of the oil…

Bugyal is the local name in Uttarakhand for the alpine meadows that lie above the tree line in the Greater Himalayas, used by shepherds for summer grazing; in Kashmir the same meadows are called marg, which gives the names Gulmarg and Sonmarg.

It is the polar belt beyond about 70 degrees latitude, where the warmest month stays below 10 degrees Celsius and the subsoil remains frozen as permafrost, so Koppen codes it ET in his polar E group.

Minicoy is the southernmost island of the Lakshadweep group, and it lies well apart from the rest of the archipelago.

The Banihal Pass crosses the Pir Panjal range and is the gateway between the Jammu region and the Kashmir valley, carrying the Jammu to Srinagar national highway at a height of about 2832 metres.

The Himalayas are young fold mountains, formed when the sediments of the Tethys Sea were squeezed and folded as the Indian plate collided with the Eurasian plate.

Mountains are built by endogenic forces, the forces that act from inside the earth and raise, bend or break the crust.

Census 2011 put the rural sex ratio at 949 females per thousand males and the urban sex ratio at 929, while the figure for the country as a whole was 943, the highest since 1951.

The Roaring Forties are the strong westerly winds of the southern hemisphere between about 40 and 50 degrees south. They blow with such force because there is almost no land in that belt to slow them down, so sailing ships once used them on the route to Australia.

The Sabarmati rises in the Aravalli Range in the Udaipur district of Rajasthan, then flows south-west across Gujarat and empties into the Gulf of Khambhat in the Arabian Sea after a course of about 371 km.

Mosses, lichens and low shrubs make up the tundra, the treeless cover of the lands around the Arctic Ocean and of high mountain slopes above the tree line.

Odisha is the largest producer of bauxite in India and accounts for more than half of the country's output.

In the colour coding of India's agricultural revolutions the Silver Fibre Revolution stands for cotton, the fibre crop of the black soil regions of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Telangana.

Kharif crops are sown in June and July with the onset of the south-west monsoon and harvested in September and October, because they need both high temperature and heavy rainfall while growing.

Water erosion of soil moves through a fixed sequence: raindrops first loosen the soil, that is splash erosion; the water then takes off a thin even layer of topsoil, which is sheet erosion; the flow soon gathers into small finger-like channels called rills; and when those rills are cut deeper…

Weathering is the natural breaking down of rock by temperature, water, wind and living things, and it is the process that makes soil in the first place; it is not a technique that a farmer applies to save soil, so it cannot be a conservation method.