Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 143

The Earth is slightly flattened at the poles, and the poles themselves are points, not lines. Because the Earth is an oblate spheroid, a degree of latitude is a little shorter at the equator, about 110.6 km, than near the poles, about 111.7 km.

Eritrea became independent of Ethiopia in 1993 after a long war and took with it the entire Red Sea coast, including the ports of Massawa and Assab, leaving Ethiopia landlocked; Ethiopia is today the most populous landlocked country in the world and routes most of its trade through Djibouti.

Himalayan rivers are perennial, so statement 1 is wrong, while statements 2 and 3 are correct. Himalayan rivers such as the Ganga, Indus and Brahmaputra rise from glaciers and snowfields and also get monsoon rain, so they flow all year round, including in winter.

Its thick ice sheet lifts its average elevation above that of every other continent, and it has no permanent population, only the changing crews of research stations maintained under the Antarctic Treaty system; it is also the coldest, driest and windiest continent and counts as the largest cold desert.

Tso Kar, Pangong Tso and Tso Moriri are high-altitude lakes of Ladakh, while Tsomgo lies in Sikkim. Pangong Tso, at about 4,350 metres, is a long, narrow lake that stretches from Ladakh into Tibet, and most of its length lies on the Chinese side.

The Indira Gandhi Canal, which was called the Rajasthan Canal when it was begun, starts at the Harike barrage in Punjab, just below the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej, and runs south-west through Haryana into the desert districts of Rajasthan.

At about 1,684 km, the Kolkata–Chennai arm along the east coast is the longest of the four sides of the Golden Quadrilateral.

A dispersed or isolated pattern, in which a farmstead or two or three houses stand far from the next, is found where the terrain is broken and the patches of cultivable land are small and scattered, as in Meghalaya, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and the hills of Kerala.

The first census was attempted in 1872 and it has been held regularly every ten years since 1881.

On the east, India has a land boundary with Myanmar and Bangladesh. India shares land borders with seven countries.

The Chambal valley is the best-known Indian example of land destroyed by intensive gully erosion, which has carved it into deep ravines.

The Strait of Gibraltar is the narrow entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean, with the Rock of Gibraltar on the European side and Jebel Musa on the African side; the two headlands were known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules.

Temperate cyclones are carried from west to east by the westerlies, while tropical cyclones generally move from east to west with the trade winds.

Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world, and Escondida, in the same desert, is the other name to remember.

The Damanganga Reservoir Project is the main irrigation scheme of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, whose canal network of about 115 km of minor canals and distributaries serves the territory.

Denali, which was earlier called Mount McKinley, stands in Alaska in the United States and is the highest peak of North America at about six thousand one hundred ninety metres; the name means the high one in the local Athabaskan language and was officially restored in 2015.

The Ten Degree Channel, which runs along this latitude, separates the Andaman group from the Nicobar group. The Ten Degree Channel lies between Little Andaman in the north and Car Nicobar in the south, and it is about 150 km wide.

The Shompen are a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group who live in the forests of Great Nicobar Island. The Shompen are a semi-nomadic people who hunt, gather and grow a little food along the rivers of Great Nicobar's forested interior, and they have very little contact with outsiders.

Hambantota Port lies on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, close to the main shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean.

Britain handed Hong Kong back to China on 1 July 1997, and it became a Special Administrative Region under the principle of one country, two systems.