Static GK GK Questions with Answers – Page 20

The bald eagle has been the national bird and the central figure of the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and the bison was later adopted as the national mammal.

It is the largest marsupial of the continent and appears on the coat of arms of Australia along with the emu, the two chosen because neither animal can easily walk backwards, which was read as a country always moving forward.

The Pamir plateau, where the Himalaya, the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush, the Kunlun and the Tian Shan meet, carries an average elevation of several thousand metres and is therefore called the Roof of the World, a name sometimes extended to the Tibetan plateau.

The Kosi descends from Nepal carrying a very heavy silt load, builds up its own bed and shifts its channel across the north Bihar plain, flooding fresh stretches of farmland, which is why it is called the Sorrow of Bihar.

Kochi in Kerala, with its natural harbour and its long history as a spice port trading with the Arabs, the Chinese, the Portuguese and the Dutch, is called the Queen of the Arabian Sea.

Coimbatore grew into a centre of cotton spinning and textile machinery on the strength of the black cotton soil of the region and its hydroelectric power, so it took the southern version of the Manchester epithet.

Ireland is called the Emerald Isle because its heavy rainfall and mild Atlantic climate keep the countryside green all year, emerald being the green gemstone.

A cockpit was a pit where cockfights were staged, and Belgium received the name because its plains were the chosen battleground of European powers for centuries, Waterloo and the battles of the First World War among them.

Switzerland earned the name from its Alpine scenery, its lakes and the mountaineering and skiing resorts that drew European travellers from the nineteenth century onwards.

The annual flood of the Nile spread fertile silt over a narrow strip of desert and made settled agriculture and the Egyptian civilisation possible, which is why Egypt is called the Gift of the Nile.

A large part of Norway lies north of the Arctic Circle, and at such latitudes the sun does not set for weeks around the summer solstice, so it can be seen at midnight; this is the phenomenon behind the epithet.

Bhutan calls itself Druk Yul, which means the land of the thunder dragon, and the dragon appears on its national flag; the name is traced to the thunderstorms that roll through its Himalayan valleys.

The Mannerheim Line was built by Finland across the Karelian Isthmus and is named after Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim; it was the main Finnish defensive position against the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939 and 1940.

After the war of 1971 India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement, which provided that the line resulting from the ceasefire of December 1971 would be respected by both sides, and from then on that line was called the Line of Control.

India's land border with Bangladesh is about 4,096 kilometres long, the longest it has with any neighbour, and it touches five states: West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram.

The Oder and Neisse Line follows the courses of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse rivers and was settled as the western boundary of Poland after the Second World War, which moved Poland's frontier a long way west.

The Maginot Line was a chain of concrete forts and obstacles built by France along its eastern frontier between the two world wars, facing Germany, and named after the French minister of war Andre Maginot.

A long stretch of the border between the United States and Canada, from the Lake of the Woods to the Strait of Georgia, follows the 49th parallel of north latitude, which is why that part of the frontier appears as a perfectly straight line on any map; a boundary drawn…

The Korean peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel of north latitude after the Second World War, and although the armistice line of 1953 does not follow the parallel exactly, the Demilitarized Zone runs close to it and the parallel remains the name used for the division.

The Simla Convention brought together representatives of British India, Tibet and China, and the line drawn there by Sir Henry McMahon runs along the crest of the eastern Himalaya; India treats it as the boundary with China in the eastern sector, while China rejects it and claims Arunachal Pradesh.