Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 38

The correct answer is A, Visakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, a land-locked natural harbour sheltered by the Dolphin's Nose headland and the deepest of India's major ports, which is why it handles iron ore, crude oil and coal in large ships and houses a major naval base.

New oceanic crust is made at mid-ocean ridges, where magma rises, cools and is pushed outwards on both sides, and that process is called seafloor spreading.

The reason is the combination of fertile alluvial soil, assured water from the Ganga and its tributaries and a largely rural population living in closely spaced villages.

The Tropic of Capricorn runs at about 23.5 degrees south and misses Uruguay, which lies further south between roughly 30 and 35 degrees.

The Golden Quadrilateral, the first phase of the National Highways Development Project, is a 5,846 kilometre ring of four and six lane highways joining the four metropolitan cities, and its purpose was to cut the time and cost of moving goods between the ports and the interior.

An anticyclone is a system of high pressure, with the highest pressure at its centre, and the air there sinks from above.

The correct answer is C, Arunachal Pradesh, which recorded only 17 persons per square kilometre, the lowest among the states, because most of its area is steep mountain and dense forest with very little cultivable land.

Young fold mountains were raised in the Tertiary period, only a few tens of millions of years ago in geological time, so erosion has had little time to wear them down and many of them are still rising as the plates behind them keep pushing.

The correct answer is C, 1.676 metres, the Indian broad gauge, which carries almost all the traffic of the network and is the gauge to which the older lines have been converted under Project Unigauge.

In the troposphere the air is warmed mainly from below: the earth absorbs incoming short-wave insolation and then heats the layer of air touching it by conduction, radiation and convection.

The correct answer is A, Kerala, with a literacy rate of 93.91 per cent, the highest among the states, the result of a long history of schooling, missionary and princely state education and high female literacy.

An earthquake is the shaking of the ground when energy stored along a fault is suddenly released, and that shaking sets off further hazards.

The correct answer is B, Kolkata, where the first underground metro service in India opened in 1984 between Esplanade and Bhowanipore on the north to south line, and the Metro Railway of Kolkata is the only metro system that is run as a zone of the Indian Railways.

It is a sea level canal: the Mediterranean and the Red Sea stand at almost the same height, so ships sail straight through without being raised or lowered.

The correct answer is B, Sikkim, whose population in Census 2011 was about 6.1 lakh, the smallest of any state; among the union territories the smallest was Lakshadweep with about 64,000 people.

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.

It was opened in 1989 to take the container traffic that the old Mumbai docks could not handle and it carries the largest share of India's container trade, with the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor built to feed it.

The Blue Revolution means the rapid rise in fish production, so it belongs to pisciculture, the rearing of fish. In India it began with the Fish Farmers Development Agency set up in the early 1970s, and Dr Hiralal Chaudhuri, who worked out induced breeding in carp, is called its father.

It is the only census year in which the population of India actually declined, the cause being the influenza epidemic of 1918 along with famine and outbreaks of plague and cholera.

The census is taken under the Census Act of 1948 by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs, and census is a Union subject so the responsibility is wholly that of the central government.