Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 44

The correct answer is C, Chile. The Atacama lies along the Pacific side of northern Chile, dried by two causes together: the Andes block moisture from the Amazon side and put it in a deep rain shadow, and the cold Peru or Humboldt current offshore chills the air so that little moisture moves inland. Some of its weather stations have recorded no measurable rain for years at a stretch. Option A, Mexico, holds parts of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, which are arid but not the driest. Option B, Namibia, has the Namib, a coastal desert that is among the oldest on earth and is cooled by the Benguela current, and it is often offered here as the near miss. Option D, Argentina, has the Patagonian Desert, the largest in South America, lying in the rain shadow on the eastern side of the same Andes.

The correct answer is D, 2.4%. India covers about 32.87 lakh square kilometres, which is roughly 2.4 per cent of the world's total land area.

That small share supports about 17 to 18 per cent of the world's people, and this gap between land and population is what the question is really testing. By area India is the seventh largest country in the world, after Russia, Canada, the United States, China, Brazil and Australia. Its mainland runs from about 8 degrees 4 minutes North to 37 degrees 6 minutes North, and from 68 degrees 7 minutes East to 97 degrees 25 minutes East, giving a north to south length of about 3,214 km and an east to west width of about 2,933 km.

A is wrong: 2.8 per cent is higher than India's actual share. B is wrong: 3.9 per cent overstates that share by more than half. C is wrong: 4.2 per cent is nearly double the correct figure.

Exam tip: India has 2.4 per cent of the world's land area and about 17 per cent of its population, and is the seventh largest country.

The correct answer is C, groundwater. Rainwater charged with carbon dioxide becomes a weak carbonic acid, seeps along joints in limestone and dissolves calcium carbonate by carbonation. Inside a cavern the dripping water loses carbon dioxide and redeposits that calcium carbonate, building stalactites downward from the roof, stalagmites upward from the floor, and a pillar where the two meet. The whole family of such features belongs to karst topography. Option A, wind, produces mushroom rocks, yardangs, dunes and loess, all in dry regions with bare surfaces. Option B, glacier, carves cirques, aretes, horns and U-shaped valleys and deposits moraines and drumlins. Option D, sea waves, cut cliffs, caves, arches and stacks along a coast and build beaches, spits and lagoons. A useful memory hook is that a stalactite holds tight to the ceiling while a stalagmite might grow up from the ground.

The correct answer is A, Tube well. Tube wells irrigate the largest share of the net irrigated area of Rajasthan, and groundwater drawn through tube wells and wells together waters the greater part of the state's fields. The reason is the climate: rainfall is low and uncertain over most of the state and perennial rivers are few, so a farmer who wants a second crop has to pump water. This heavy drawing of groundwater has pushed many blocks of Rajasthan into the over-exploited category, which is why drip and sprinkler irrigation are pressed in the state. B is wrong because ponds and tanks serve only small pockets, mostly in the south and south-east. C is wrong because open wells, once the mainstay, now water a much smaller area than tube wells. D is wrong because canals, led by the Indira Gandhi Canal, come second and are limited to the north-west and the Chambal command. Exam tip: in Rajasthan groundwater leads, tube wells first and canals second.

The correct answer is B, the Congo. Its basin lies on both sides of the Equator in central Africa, so the river crosses the line once as it flows north and again as it swings west and south towards the Atlantic. The effect matters: some part of the basin is always in its rainy season, so the discharge stays high through the year and the Congo ranks second in the world by volume after the Amazon. It is also the deepest river on earth. Option A, the Amazon, flows close to and just south of the Equator but does not cross it twice. Option C, the Niger, makes a great arc through West Africa well to the north of the line and ends in the Gulf of Guinea. Option D, the Zambezi, lies entirely in the southern hemisphere and carries the Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The correct answer is D, Minicoy. Minicoy is the southernmost island of the Lakshadweep group, and it lies well apart from the rest of the archipelago.

Lakshadweep is a union territory of 36 islands, of which about ten are inhabited, with Kavaratti as its capital. The group falls into three parts: the Amindivi islands in the north, the Laccadive islands in the middle and Minicoy in the south. Minicoy is cut off from the other islands by the Nine Degree Channel and from the Maldives by the Eight Degree Channel. Its people speak Mahl, written in the Thaana script, which sets the island apart from the Malayalam speaking islands to its north.

A is wrong: Bitra is the smallest inhabited island and lies in the north of the group. B is wrong: Kavaratti is the capital and sits in the middle of the chain. C is wrong: Amini is one of the northern Amindivi islands.

Exam tip: Minicoy is the southernmost island; the Nine Degree Channel separates it from the other Lakshadweep islands and the Eight Degree Channel separates it from the Maldives.

The correct answer is B, a meandering river cutting off a loop. In its middle and lower course a river swings from side to side, eroding the outer bank of each bend and depositing on the inner bank. The neck of a loop grows narrower until a flood cuts straight across it; the abandoned loop is sealed off by silt and survives as a crescent-shaped lake, the ox-bow. Option A describes a cirque or a tarn, both glacial hollows of the high mountains, which are circular rather than crescent-shaped. Option C, wind deflation, scoops shallow basins in deserts that hold water only briefly and are not loop-shaped. Option D describes a caldera lake, such as Lonar in Maharashtra, which is formed in a crater and has nothing to do with river bends. Examiners often pair this with the fact that ox-bow lakes are common on the flood plains of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra.

The correct answer is B, Black. On Survey of India topographical sheets, railway lines, telegraph and telephone lines, settlement names and boundaries are printed in black, so black is the colour of such man-made linear features.

These sheets follow a fixed colour code, which lets a reader tell features apart at a glance: metalled roads and grid lines appear in red, contours in brown, rivers, canals and tanks in blue, open scrub, grass and cultivated land in yellow, and woodland in green.

Option A, yellow, stands for cultivated land and open fields, not railways. Option C, blue, is kept for water features. Option D, red, is used for roads, grid lines and some settlement symbols.

Exam tip: black for railways and telephone lines, blue for water, green for forest, brown for contours, yellow for cultivated land.

The correct answer is C, the Caspian Sea. The Volga rises in the hills north-west of Moscow, flows across European Russia and ends in a delta near Astrakhan on the Caspian, which is a landlocked basin and the largest inland water body on earth. Because the Caspian has no outlet to an ocean, the Volga is the classic example of a river draining into an inland sea. Option A, the Black Sea, receives the Danube, the Dnieper and the Don, not the Volga. Option B, the Baltic Sea, receives the Vistula, the Oder and the Neva. Option D, the North Sea, receives the Rhine, the Elbe and the Thames. A second fact worth carrying with this one is that the Volga is the longest river that lies wholly within one country in Europe, and that a canal links it to the Don and so to the Black Sea.

The correct answer is A, Endogenic Forces. Mountains are built by endogenic forces, the forces that act from inside the earth and raise, bend or break the crust. They draw their energy from the earth’s internal heat and from the movement of the plates. Slow or diastrophic movements fold and lift rock over millions of years and give rise to fold mountains such as the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, while sudden movements appear as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which build volcanic mountains. Endogenic forces are therefore called constructive, because they create relief on the surface. B is wrong because exogenic forces such as running water, wind, waves and glaciers act on the surface and wear mountains down instead of raising them. C is wrong because gravity only helps loose material move downhill, as in landslides. D is wrong because the earth’s magnetic field records plate movement but does not lift land. Exam tip: endogenic forces build through diastrophism and volcanism, exogenic forces destroy through weathering and erosion.

The correct answer is B, northern China. Loess is a depositional landform of wind: very fine silt lifted from desert and glacial margins is carried far away and settles as a yellow, porous, loosely packed sheet. The thickest and most extensive sheets on earth are in the loess plateau of northern China, which gives the Huang He its colour and its name, the Yellow River. Option A, Brazil, lies mostly in humid tropics where chemical weathering and thick forest cover prevent such deposition. Option C, Canada, carries glacial deposits such as moraines, drumlins and eskers, with only small patches of loess. Option D, Australia, has large deserts but its wind deposits take the form of long seif dunes rather than great loess sheets. A connected fact worth remembering is that loess soils are naturally fertile and self-draining, which is why the Chinese loess belt supports dense farming despite its extreme vulnerability to gully erosion.

The correct answer is D, Uruguay. The Tropic of Capricorn runs at about 23.5 degrees south and misses Uruguay, which lies further south between roughly 30 and 35 degrees. In South America the line crosses Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil; going east it passes through Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar and Australia, in all ten countries. It marks the farthest point south at which the Sun is overhead, which happens on 22 December, the summer solstice of the southern hemisphere. Option A is wrong because the line crosses northern Chile near the Atacama desert. Option B is wrong because it passes through Brazil just north of Sao Paulo, and the city sits almost on it. Option C is wrong because it runs across Paraguay, cutting the country into a northern tropical part and a southern temperate part. Exam tip: the Tropic of Cancer crosses eight states of India, while the Tropic of Capricorn passes through no part of India at all.

The correct answer is B, the Ural mountains. The range runs roughly north to south through Russia from the Arctic coast towards the Caspian, and geographers have long used it, with the Ural river and the Caucasus, as the conventional line dividing the European part of Eurasia from the Asian part. Option A, the Alps, lies well inside Europe and divides Italy from France, Switzerland and Austria; Mont Blanc is its highest peak. Option C, the Carpathians, curves through central and eastern Europe from Slovakia to Romania and holds the Transylvanian basin inside its arc. Option D, the Pyrenees, forms the border between France and Spain and shelters the small state of Andorra. A related fact often asked alongside this one is that the highest peak of Europe is Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, not Mont Blanc in the Alps.

The correct answer is C, eye. The calm centre of a cyclone is called the eye of the storm, a roughly circular area twenty to fifty kilometres across where the air sinks, the winds are light and the sky can even be clear.

Around the eye stands the eye wall, a ring of tall clouds where the wind is strongest and the rain heaviest, so fierce weather returns soon after the deceptive calm passes over a place. A cyclone forms over warm tropical seas when moist air rises, condenses and releases heat, and it weakens quickly after landfall because its supply of moisture is cut off.

Option A, arm, is not a term used for any part of a cyclone. Option B, heart, is not the scientific name for the centre. Option D, head, is also not a cyclone term.

Exam tip: the eye is calm, the eye wall carries the strongest winds.

The correct answer is C, moraine. A moraine is the ridge of unsorted rock debris that a glacier carries and dumps; it is named by position as lateral, medial, ground or terminal moraine, and the terminal moraine marks the farthest point the ice reached. Option A, a cirque, is an armchair-shaped hollow cut at the head of a glacial valley by plucking and abrasion, so it is erosional. Option B, an arete, is the sharp knife-edged ridge left where two cirques erode back towards each other, again erosional. Option D, a horn, is the pyramidal peak produced when three or more cirques eat into the same mountain mass, the Matterhorn being the classic example, and it too is erosional. The other depositional forms of ice that papers ask about are drumlins, eskers, kames and outwash plains, so a safe way to answer is to recall that erosion by ice hollows and sharpens, while deposition by ice piles up.

The correct answer is A, Fold Mountain. The Himalayas are young fold mountains, formed when the sediments of the Tethys Sea were squeezed and folded as the Indian plate collided with the Eurasian plate.

Because that collision still continues, the range is rising even now and the whole belt stays earthquake prone. The Alps, the Rockies and the Andes belong to the same class, and like them the Himalayas run in parallel ranges — the Himadri, the Himachal and the Shiwaliks.

Option B, plateau mountain, is not a standard category; plateaus such as the Deccan are flat uplands, not folded ranges. Option C, fault-block mountain, forms when land between two faults is lifted or its sides sink, as in the Satpura and Vindhya blocks. Option D, dome mountain, forms when magma pushes the rock above it upward without erupting.

Exam tip: Himalayas, Alps, Andes and Rockies are young fold mountains; Satpura is a block mountain.

The correct answer is B, the Arabian Desert. The Rub al Khali, whose name is usually translated as the Empty Quarter, occupies the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and it is the largest unbroken sand sea on earth. Option A, the Sahara, is much larger overall but is a mosaic of sand seas, called ergs, together with gravel plains and bare rock, so no single body of sand in it matches the Empty Quarter. Option C, the Thar or Great Indian Desert, lies mainly in Rajasthan and extends into Pakistan, and is far smaller. Option D, the Takla Makan, is a cold sand desert in Xinjiang in China, ringed by the Kunlun, Pamir and Tian Shan mountains. Keep the Empty Quarter with Arabia and the ergs with the Sahara.

The correct answer is A, Slovenia. The term comes from the Kras or Karst plateau of the Dinaric region, which lies largely in present-day Slovenia and extends into the neighbouring coastal belt. The limestone there is riddled with sinkholes, dolines, swallow holes, caverns and underground streams, and geographers adopted the local name for every landscape where soluble rock is sculpted by groundwater. In India the Borra caves of Andhra Pradesh and the caves of the Meghalaya plateau show the same features. Option B, Greece, has extensive limestone but did not give the landform its name. Option C, Switzerland, is associated with alpine and glacial terms such as cirque and arete rather than with karst. Option D, Norway, is remembered for fjords, the drowned glacial troughs of its western coast. Examiners like to combine this question with the pairing of carbonation as the process and limestone or dolomite as the rock.

The correct answer is B, the Danube. It rises in the Black Forest of Germany, flows east across central and south-eastern Europe past Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary and Belgrade in Serbia, and ends in a delta on the Black Sea. It passes through or along the border of more countries than any other river in the world, which is the fact papers ask most often about it. Option A, the Rhine, flows north from the Alps through Switzerland and Germany to the Netherlands and the North Sea, past Basel, Cologne and Rotterdam. Option C, the Elbe, rises in the Czech lands and reaches the North Sea at Hamburg, passing Dresden on the way. Option D, the Seine, is the river of Paris and reaches the English Channel near Le Havre. Pair each capital with its river, because the question is often reversed.

The correct answer is B, a deep glacial trough later invaded by the sea. A valley glacier reaching the coast scoops its floor below present sea level; when the ice melts and the sea rises, water floods the trough and leaves a long, narrow, steep-sided inlet with great depth. Norway, Chile, New Zealand and Greenland have the best examples. Option A is wrong because wind in deserts hollows shallow basins and shapes yardangs, and cannot cut a deep drowned valley. Option C describes a crater or caldera lake, such as Lonar in Maharashtra, which is circular and unconnected to the sea. Option D describes a gorge or canyon of river erosion, which keeps a V-shaped cross section rather than the U-shaped profile of glacial work. The cross section is the clue examiners rely on: a river cuts a V, a glacier widens it into a U, and a drowned U is a fjord.