Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 18

The south-west monsoon normally sets in over the Kerala coast about the first of June, and the sudden heavy downpour that marks its arrival is called the burst of the monsoon.

Tropical dry deciduous forest covers the largest share of India's forest area.

Spring tides occur at new moon and at full moon, when the sun, the earth and the moon lie in a straight line, a position called syzygy.

Iron and steel is indeed a heavy industry, but not because of light raw materials. Industries are classified by the weight of the material they handle.

Mawsynram lies in the Khasi hills, and the neighbouring Cherrapunji, now called Sohra, stands close behind it.

Milpa is the name given to shifting cultivation in Mexico and in the neighbouring parts of Central America, where maize, beans and squash are grown together on a patch cleared from the forest.

The bay narrows and shallows inland, so the incoming tidal wave is funnelled into a smaller and smaller cross-section and its height is greatly magnified, giving the greatest difference between high and low water anywhere on earth.

Zoji La, or the Zojila pass, lies in the Zanskar range of the Himalayas at a height of about 3,528 metres.

These are the violent evening thunderstorms of the months before the monsoon in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, and the name means the calamity of the month of Baisakh because the squalls can flatten huts and trees.

Dang is not a South Indian tribe. The name belongs to the Dangs district of southern Gujarat, whose tribal people are mainly Bhil, Warli and Konkana, all of western India.

It flows northward along the western coast of southern Africa, carrying cool water from the Southern Ocean towards the equator, and the upwelling along it makes the Namibian coast a rich fishing zone while helping to keep the Namib desert dry.

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.

These are low pressure systems, that is temperate cyclones, which form over the Mediterranean and the Caspian region and travel eastwards with the westerly jet stream.

Red Sindhi is an indigenous Indian dairy breed of cattle, while the other three are Indian dog breeds.

The warm Gulf Stream moving north-east meets the cold Labrador current coming south past Newfoundland. Nutrients carried by the cold water mix with the warmer surface layer, plankton multiplies, and huge shoals of cod once gathered there.

A ‘million city’ is a city or urban agglomeration with a population of ten lakh or more. Kanpur, the leather and textile centre on the Ganga once called the ‘Manchester of the East’, crossed this mark in the 1971 Census and became the first million city of Uttar Pradesh.

El Nino is the periodic warming of the surface water of the central and eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, and the name, meaning the child, was given by fishermen because it appears around Christmas.

Sodium chloride makes up most of it, with magnesium, calcium and potassium salts making up the rest. Salinity varies with evaporation, rainfall, river inflow and the melting or freezing of ice, so the figure is an average rather than a fixed value.

Its southern end holds the Challenger Deep, the deepest surveyed point on earth at roughly eleven kilometres below sea level, deep enough to swallow Mount Everest with water to spare.

The continental shelf is the gently sloping submerged edge of a continent, usually taken down to about two hundred metres.