Geography Quiz: Drainage Patterns and River Basins of India

The word comes from the Greek for tree, and the pattern develops where the underlying rock is of uniform hardness and the slope is gentle, so the streams branch freely without being guided by lines of weakness; the tributaries of the Ganga in the northern plain are the standard Indian…

In a radial pattern the streams start from a dome, a volcanic cone or a high plateau and run outward in all directions like the spokes of a wheel.

The correct answer is C, the Ganga basin, which covers about 8.6 lakh square kilometres inside India, close to a quarter of the country, and takes in parts of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Delhi.

It rises at Trimbakeshwar in Nashik district of Maharashtra, runs about one thousand four hundred kilometres across Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to the Bay of Bengal, and drains about 3.1 lakh square kilometres, the largest catchment in the peninsula, which is why it is called the Ganga of the…

Loktak lies in the floor of the Manipur valley, which is ringed by hills, so the streams of the valley run inward into it from every side, the classic shape of a centripetal pattern; the lake is also known for its floating phumdis and for Keibul Lamjao, the only floating…

These rivers were flowing when the Himalaya was still rising, and instead of being turned aside they cut downward as fast as the land rose, leaving the gorges of the Indus near Gilgit, of the Satluj at Shipki and of the Brahmaputra at the great bend in the Dihang.

It flows west through the narrow rift between the Vindhya and the Satpura ranges and opens into the Gulf of Khambhat, where strong tides sweep away the silt, so the river ends in a funnel shaped estuary and not a delta; the Tapi, which also flows west in a rift…

The correct answer is A, the Amarkantak plateau in Madhya Pradesh, where the Narmada rises at about one thousand metres and begins its westward journey of some thirteen hundred kilometres through Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat to the Gulf of Khambhat; on the way it makes the Dhuandhar falls and the…

It is the second of the two large west flowing peninsular rivers and runs almost parallel to the Narmada, with the Satpura range between them.

The divide between the two great northern systems does not run along a mountain here but across the almost flat plain of Haryana, and Ambala sits on it, so water falling a little to its west goes to the Ghaggar and the Indus side while water falling to its east…