Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 47

The correct answer is D. The India Meteorological Department grades a system of the north Indian Ocean by its sustained wind speed, and the highest grade, the super cyclonic storm, begins at two hundred and twenty-two kilometres per hour. Option A is wrong because sixty-two to eighty-seven kilometres per hour is the band of an ordinary cyclonic storm, the stage at which the system is given a name. Option B is wrong because eighty-eight to one hundred and seventeen kilometres per hour is a severe cyclonic storm. Option C is wrong because one hundred and eighteen to one hundred and sixty-six kilometres per hour is a very severe cyclonic storm, and the band above it, up to two hundred and twenty-one, is the extremely severe cyclonic storm. Below the storm stages lie the depression at thirty-one to forty-nine and the deep depression at fifty to sixty-one kilometres per hour.

The correct answer is D, Polar type. Koeppen grouped climates by temperature and rainfall and gave each group a capital letter, and E stands for the polar group, where the mean temperature of the warmest month stays below 10 degrees Celsius. In India this type is met only in the high Himalaya, in Ladakh and the upper reaches of Jammu and Kashmir, where snow lies for much of the year and the vegetation is tundra-like. Option A is wrong because tropical savannah is Aw in the scheme and covers most of the peninsular interior. Option B is wrong because the hot desert of western Rajasthan is marked BWhw. Option C is wrong because monsoon with a dry summer is As, the climate of the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu, which gets most of its rain from the retreating monsoon. Exam tip: Koeppen's first letters are A tropical, B dry, C warm temperate, D cold snow forest and E polar.

The correct answer is C, Velds and South Africa. The Velds are the temperate grasslands of the high plateau of South Africa, where maize and cattle farming and the gold mining of the Witwatersrand go together. Option A is wrong because the Pustaz is the grassland of Hungary, in the middle Danube basin. Option B is wrong because Canterbury is the grassland of the South Island of New Zealand, famous for sheep. Option D is wrong on both counts, because the Downs are the grasslands of Australia, especially the Murray Darling basin, and the grassland of Argentina is the Pampas. The question works entirely on swapped pairs, so memorise the list as one chain: Prairies in North America, Pampas in Argentina, Velds in South Africa, Downs in Australia, Steppes in Eurasia, Pustaz in Hungary and Canterbury in New Zealand.

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 D, only II. Statement I is wrong because the equatorial belt receives very heavy rainfall and has high cloud cover, so the surface water there is diluted; the highest salinity in the open ocean is recorded in the subtropical high pressure belts, roughly between twenty and thirty degrees of latitude, where skies are clear, evaporation is strong and rainfall is slight. Statement II is correct, because the northern hemisphere, with its enclosed and partly landlocked seas and its narrower expanse of cold southern water, has a higher average surface salinity than the southern hemisphere, where the vast Southern Ocean is fed by melting ice. Option A is wrong because statement II is true. Option B is wrong because statement I is false. Option C is wrong for the same reason, since it accepts the equatorial claim.

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, the Ganga, Bhagirathi and Hooghly. National Waterway 1 runs 1,620 km from Haldia in West Bengal to Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and was the first waterway to be declared national, in 1986. Option A is wrong because the Brahmaputra from Dhubri to Sadiya is National Waterway 2, declared in 1988. Option C is wrong because stretches of the Godavari and the Krishna, together with the Kakinada and Puducherry canals, make up National Waterway 4. Option D is wrong because the Narmada is a separate and much later declared waterway, numbered 73, and the Tapi is not among the older waterways at all. NW-1 is also the waterway on which the Jal Marg Vikas Project is being carried out.

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 A. A temperate or extra-tropical cyclone is a frontal system: it forms between about thirty-five and sixty-five degrees latitude where a cold polar air mass meets a warm subtropical one, and the warm air is forced to rise along the front, giving slow and widespread rain over a large area. Option B is wrong because the eye and the eye wall belong only to the tropical cyclone; a temperate cyclone has no eye. Option C is wrong because it is the tropical cyclone that dies quickly over land, having lost its supply of warm moist air, while a temperate cyclone travels across continents from west to east. Option D is wrong because the five-degree rule describes where tropical cyclones cannot form; temperate cyclones form far from the equator in any case, so the statement does not distinguish them.

The correct answer is D, flow channel. In a flow channel the water runs from the canal head down to the fields purely under gravity, because the bed of the canal is laid at a slope and the source lies higher than the land it serves. Canals are therefore taken off a river or a reservoir at a point high enough for the water to move on its own, and flow irrigation is cheaper to run than any system that needs machinery. Option A is wrong because a lift channel carries water that has to be raised by pumps, the source lying below the land to be watered. Option B is wrong because the command area is the stretch of land a canal is able to irrigate, not a channel at all. Option C is wrong because warabandi is the roster that fixes each farmer's turn and time for drawing water, a method of sharing rather than a type of channel. Exam tip: flow irrigation works by gravity, lift irrigation needs pumps.

The correct answer is B. The taiga is the belt of coniferous softwood forest between about 50 and 70 degrees latitude, and in the southern hemisphere that belt is almost entirely ocean: only the narrow tail of South America and a few islands reach it, which is far too little land for a continuous forest belt. Option A is wrong because the south is not too warm; the latitude is cool enough, there is simply no land there. Option C is wrong because conifers do grow in the south, in the mountains of Chile, New Zealand and Australia, only not as a vast belt. Option D is wrong because the southern hemisphere has great ranges such as the Andes and the Drakensberg; mountains are not the reason. This asymmetry of land and water is also why the south has a smaller annual range of temperature.

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

Red Sindhi cattle take their name from the Sindh region and are reddish-brown, hardy and able to bear heat, which is why they have been used to improve milk yield in many tropical countries. Sahiwal, Gir, Tharparkar and Deoni are the other well-known indigenous milch breeds, while Amritmahal, Hallikar and Kangayam are draught breeds. Under the Rashtriya Gokul Mission the government works to conserve and develop such native breeds.

B is wrong: Chippiparai is a sight hound dog breed of Tamil Nadu. C is wrong: Kanni is also a dog breed from southern Tamil Nadu. D is wrong: Kombai is a Tamil Nadu hunting dog breed, not cattle.

Exam tip: Indigenous milch cattle - Red Sindhi, Sahiwal, Gir, Tharparkar, Deoni; Chippiparai, Kanni and Kombai are dog breeds.

The correct answer is B, the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean, whose Challenger Deep reaches a depth of about eleven kilometres and is the deepest known point on the earth's surface. Option A, the Java or Sunda Trench, is wrong because it is the deepest trench of the Indian Ocean, not of the world. Option C, the Puerto Rico Trench, is wrong because it is the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. Option D, the Tonga Trench, is wrong although it is indeed one of the deepest trenches of the Pacific, second only to the Mariana. Trenches are the narrow, steep-sided deeps that lie beyond 6,000 metres, they form where one plate descends beneath another, and most of the world's trenches are found around the rim of the Pacific.

The correct answer is C, Panthalassa. In the continental drift theory that Alfred Wegener put forward in 1912, the single land mass was Pangaea and the single mega ocean around it was Panthalassa, a Greek name meaning all sea. Wegener held that Pangaea began to break up about 200 million years ago, first into Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south, with the Tethys Sea between them, and the pieces then drifted to their present places. He offered the jigsaw fit of the Atlantic coasts and matching rocks and fossils as proof, but the forces he named, the pole fleeing force and the tidal force, were too weak to convince geologists, and plate tectonics later replaced the theory. A is wrong because Pigmalion is not a geological name at all. B is wrong because Panama is an isthmus, and a country, joining North and South America. D is wrong because Pangaea was the land mass, not the ocean. Exam tip: fix the pair - Pangaea the super continent, Panthalassa the super ocean.

The correct answer is C, 1,620 km, which makes National Waterway 1 the longest of India's national waterways and the one with the largest cargo movement. Option A, 891 km, is the length of National Waterway 2 on the Brahmaputra between Dhubri and Sadiya, and it is the figure most often swapped with this one. Option B, 1,095 km, is the length of National Waterway 4, which uses the Kakinada and Puducherry canals with stretches of the Godavari and the Krishna. Option D is simply larger than any single national waterway and does not match any of them. A useful way to remember the set is 1,620 for NW-1, 891 for NW-2, 205 for NW-3, 1,095 for NW-4 and 623 for NW-5. Note also that the Prayagraj end was earlier written as Allahabad in older papers, so both names appear in question stems for the same waterway.

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, frost. When the surface on which condensation occurs is below the freezing point and the dew point is also below it, the vapour changes directly into tiny ice crystals instead of water droplets, and that white deposit is frost; it is common on clear, calm winter nights when the ground loses heat rapidly by radiation. Option A is wrong because dew forms in the same way but when the dew point is above freezing, so the moisture settles as drops of water. Option C is wrong because fog is condensation on dust and smoke nuclei in the air near the ground, which reduces visibility sharply. Option D is wrong because mist is the thinner, less dense form of the same phenomenon, with better visibility than fog. The essential conditions for dew and frost are a clear sky, still air, high relative humidity and a cold long night.

The correct answer is B. Hot deserts lie on the western margins of continents roughly between 20 and 30 degrees north and south, under the descending dry air of the subtropical high pressure belt. The trade winds there blow from the land to the sea, so they carry no moisture inland, and cold currents such as the Canary, Benguela and Peru currents chill the air over the coast and stop it from rising, which is why fog is common but rain is not. Option A is wrong because the eastern margins in low latitudes get heavy rain from the trade winds and the monsoon. Option C is wrong because the dry lands of the high interiors, such as the Gobi, are cold deserts and lie well below 60 degrees. Option D is wrong because the polar belts are cold deserts of ice, not hot deserts.

The correct answer is A, the continental shelf. It is the gently sloping, shallow margin of the continent, extending to a depth of about 200 metres with a gradient of one degree or less and an average width of about seventy to eighty kilometres, and it makes up roughly 7.5 per cent of the ocean area. Sunlight reaches its floor, so plankton grow in abundance and the great fisheries of the world lie over shelves; most offshore oil and gas also come from them. Option B, the continental slope, is wrong because it is steep and deep and marks the true edge of the continent. Option C, the abyssal plain, is wrong because it lies between 3,000 and 6,000 metres and yields only manganese nodules and fine oozes. Option D, the trench, is wrong because it is the deepest and least exploited part of the sea.

The correct answer is A, Dhubri and Sadiya. National Waterway 2 follows the Brahmaputra for 891 km inside Assam, from Dhubri on the Bangladesh border to Sadiya in the upper valley, and its principal terminal is Pandu near Guwahati. Option B names the two ends of National Waterway 1 on the Ganga system. Option C names the ends of National Waterway 3, the West Coast Canal in Kerala. Option D names the ends of National Waterway 16 on the Barak river, which serves the Barak valley of southern Assam and is often confused with NW-2 because both lie in the same state. Through the inland water transit protocol with Bangladesh, cargo on NW-2 can reach Kolkata and Haldia and ports in Bangladesh. Dhubri also serves as a port of call under the protocol with Bangladesh, which is how Assam is linked by water to Kolkata.