Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 60

The correct answer is D, 95 - 97%. Carbon dioxide makes up about 96.5% of the atmosphere of Venus and about 95% of the atmosphere of Mars.

The two neighbours of the Earth have atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide, with nitrogen and argon making up most of the rest. The difference lies in thickness. Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere, with surface pressure about 90 times that of the Earth, so its carbon dioxide traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect and makes it the hottest planet, at around 465 °C. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, less than one per cent of the Earth's pressure, so it stays cold despite the same gas. On the Earth, by contrast, carbon dioxide is only about 0.04%.

A is wrong: 45-47% is far below the real share of carbon dioxide on either planet.

B is wrong: 52-55% also understates it; carbon dioxide is the overwhelming gas, not just a majority.

C is wrong: 74-77% is closer to the share of nitrogen in the Earth's air (about 78%), not of carbon dioxide on Venus or Mars.

Exam tip: Venus and Mars ≈ 95-97% CO2; Earth ≈ 78% N2, 21% O2, 0.04% CO2.

The correct answer is A, Cameroon. South-eastern Cameroon lies inside the drainage area of the Congo river, and the country is one of the six nations that share the Congo Basin rainforest.

The Congo Basin is the huge, shallow depression drained by the Congo river and its tributaries in west-central Africa. It holds the second largest tropical rainforest on Earth after the Amazon. The countries usually counted as its core are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. The Sangha river, a Congo tributary, rises near the Cameroon border and drains its south-east.

B is wrong: Nigeria is drained by the Niger and Benue rivers, which flow to the Gulf of Guinea, not into the Congo.

C is wrong: South Sudan lies in the basin of the White Nile.

D is wrong: Uganda drains mainly into Lake Victoria and the Nile system.

Exam tip: Congo Basin forest countries are DRC, Republic of Congo, CAR, Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea; the Congo river crosses the Equator twice.

The correct answer is C, Sharavati. Gersoppa Falls, better known as Jog Falls, is where the Sharavati river plunges down the edge of the Western Ghats in Karnataka.

The falls lie in Shivamogga district, near the border with Uttara Kannada, and drop about 253 metres in four streams called Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket. They are among the highest plunge waterfalls in India. The Sharavati is a west-flowing river that rises at Ambutirtha near Thirthahalli and enters the Arabian Sea at Honnavar. The Linganamakki dam upstream feeds a major hydroelectric project, so the falls are fullest in the monsoon.

A is wrong: the Lohit is a tributary of the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, far from Karnataka.

B is wrong: the Tungabhadra flows east across the Deccan plateau to join the Krishna, passing Hampi on the way.

D is wrong: the Krishna is an east-flowing river that reaches the Bay of Bengal, not the Arabian Sea.

Exam tip: Jog = Gersoppa = Sharavati river, Shivamogga, Karnataka.

The correct answer is C, Polynesia. New Zealand forms the south-western corner of the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific islands are grouped into three regions. Polynesia ("many islands") is a vast triangle with Hawaii in the north, Easter Island in the east and New Zealand in the south-west; it also includes Samoa, Tonga and Tahiti. The Maori, New Zealand's first people, are Polynesians who reached the islands by canoe around the 13th century, and their language is close to Hawaiian and Tahitian.

A is wrong: Micronesia ("small islands") lies north of the equator and includes Guam, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati.

B is wrong: Melanesia covers Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, north-west of New Zealand.

D is wrong: the Hawaiian chain is a single archipelago at the northern tip of Polynesia, far from New Zealand.

Exam tip: Polynesian Triangle corners = Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand; Fiji is Melanesia; Guam is Micronesia.

The correct answer is C, Saudi Arabia. Ghawar, discovered in 1948 in the eastern province of the kingdom, has been the largest conventional oil field known anywhere, and it is the field most often named in exams along with Safaniya, the biggest offshore field, also Saudi.

Option A, Iraq, has the great Kirkuk and Rumaila fields, and Rumaila is among the largest in the world, but not the largest. Option B, Iran, has Ahvaz, Marun and Gachsaran in the Zagros foothills. Option D, Kuwait, has Burgan, which is usually named as the second largest conventional field and therefore the most tempting wrong answer. All four countries draw their oil from the same great sedimentary basin of West Asia, formed from the sediments of the ancient Tethys Sea.

The correct answer is A, 1 only. In January the northern oceans are warmer than the frozen continents, so isotherms bend north over the sea and south over the land; the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift are warm currents, not cold ones.

Isotherms are lines joining places of equal temperature. In the northern hemisphere winter, land loses heat quickly and becomes very cold, while the ocean keeps its warmth. A given temperature is therefore found further north over the ocean and further south over the continents such as Siberia, which makes the lines bend. Statement 2 is wrong: the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift carry warm tropical water into the North Atlantic, making it warmer, and that warmth is why the isotherms bend sharply north there, keeping ports of north-west Europe ice-free.

B is wrong because statement 2 calls warm currents cold.

C is wrong because statement 2 is false.

D is wrong because statement 1 is a correct inference.

Exam tip: January isotherms bend poleward over oceans and equatorward over land; Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift are warm currents.

The correct answer is A, 2 m. The contour interval chosen for a sheet depends chiefly on its scale and on the relief of the ground: a large-scale map can carry closely spaced contours without the lines running into each other, so a small interval is both possible and desirable. For a scale of one to ten thousand, which is a large scale used for detailed survey and engineering work, an interval of two metres is the usual choice. Options B, C and D are wrong because five, ten and twenty metre intervals belong to progressively smaller scales and flatter requirements of detail: an interval that large on a one to ten thousand sheet would leave the slopes almost blank and waste the accuracy the scale allows. The working rule to remember is that the smaller the scale and the rougher the country, the larger the contour interval.

The correct answer is C, Statement I is true but Statement II is false. Plantations do lie mostly in the humid tropics, but the soils there are generally poor, not highly fertile.

Plantation farming grows a single cash crop such as tea, coffee, rubber, sugarcane, cocoa, banana or oil palm on large estates with heavy capital and hired labour. It spread in the humid tropics of Asia, Africa and Latin America, largely under colonial rule, because these crops need high temperatures and heavy rain throughout the year. The same heavy rain leaches nutrients out of the soil, leaving laterite and other weathered red soils that are low in humus and plant food; the lush forest survives by quickly recycling nutrients from fallen leaves.

A is wrong: Statement II is false, so it cannot explain Statement I.

B is wrong: it treats the false Statement II as true.

D is wrong: Statement I is true and Statement II is false, the reverse of this option.

Exam tip: humid tropics have lush forest but leached, infertile laterite soil; plantations need the climate, not rich soil.

The correct answer is B, Scattering. Scattering acts on incoming short-wave sunlight, while the heat the Earth gives back as long-wave energy reaches the air by conduction, convection and radiation.

The Sun sends energy mostly as short waves, which pass through the atmosphere, are partly scattered by gas molecules and dust, and warm the ground. The warmed Earth then gives off long-wave, infrared terrestrial radiation. This heat passes to the air touching the ground by conduction, is carried upward by rising air in convection, and is radiated and absorbed by water vapour and carbon dioxide. That is why the atmosphere is heated mainly from below.

A is wrong: conduction passes heat from the warm ground to the layer of air in contact with it.

C is wrong: convection carries this heat upward as warm air rises, mostly within the troposphere.

D is wrong: terrestrial radiation is itself long-wave energy given out by the Earth.

Exam tip: short-wave in (insolation, scattered and reflected), long-wave out (terrestrial radiation).

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 D, Distance from the sea. Groundwater is fed by rain that soaks into the ground, so how far a place lies from the coast does not by itself decide how much groundwater it has.

Groundwater collects in the pores and cracks of rocks and soil below the water table, in layers called aquifers. Its amount in a region depends on how much water reaches the ground as rain or snow, how much of it is lost back to the air by evaporation, and how easily it can sink in, which depends on the soil, the rock, the slope and the plant cover. Porous sandstone and alluvium store a lot; hard granite and clay store little.

A is wrong: precipitation is the main source that recharges groundwater, so it clearly matters.

B is wrong: high evaporation, as in hot deserts, leaves less water to seep down.

C is wrong: infiltration capacity decides how much surface water actually enters the aquifers.

Exam tip: groundwater recharge = precipitation − (evaporation + runoff); the water-bearing rock layer is called an aquifer.

The correct answer is C, the 74th Amendment Act. The Seventy-fourth Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 inserted Part IXA into the Constitution with Articles 243P to 243ZG, gave municipalities a fixed term of five years with elections conducted by a State Election Commission, provided for reservation of seats, and added the Twelfth Schedule listing eighteen subjects for urban local bodies. B, the 73rd Amendment Act, is the standing trap: it is the twin Act of the same year, but it deals with panchayats, Part IX, Articles 243 to 243O and the Eleventh Schedule with twenty-nine subjects. A, the 72nd Amendment Act, is wrong because it concerned the representation of the Scheduled Tribes in the Tripura Legislative Assembly. D, the 76th Amendment Act, is wrong because it placed the Tamil Nadu reservation Act in the Ninth Schedule.

The correct answer is A, copper in Chile. 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 copper lies in the porphyry deposits of the Andes, which have made Chile the leading copper country for decades.

Option B is wrong because South African gold comes from the Witwatersrand basin, not from Chuquicamata. Option C names Bolivian tin, which comes from the Oruro and Potosi districts of the Bolivian plateau. Option D names Canadian nickel, which comes from Sudbury in Ontario and Thompson in Manitoba. The other great copper region to keep with Chile is the Central African Copperbelt of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Zambian towns beside it.

The correct answer is C, Hiralal Chaudhuri. Hiralal Chaudhuri is called the father of the Blue Revolution, the sharp rise in India's fish production. Working as a fishery scientist, he achieved induced breeding of carp by hormone injection in 1957, a method that freed fish farmers from depending on wild seed collected from rivers and allowed hatcheries to supply fingerlings in large numbers. Aquaculture grew from there, and India is today among the largest fish producers in the world. Option A is wrong because Verghese Kurien led the White Revolution in milk, building the Amul model and Operation Flood. Option B is wrong because Sam Pitroda is linked with the telecom revolution and the spread of public call offices. Option D is wrong because M.S. Swaminathan is the father of the Green Revolution in wheat and rice. Exam tip: learn the colour revolutions together, Green for food grains, White for milk, Blue for fish, Yellow for oilseeds, Pink for prawns and Golden for horticulture.

The correct answer is B, cylindrical, and it preserves shape. Mercator's is a cylindrical projection on which both parallels and meridians are straight lines crossing at right angles, and it is orthomorphic or conformal, meaning that shapes are true locally and a rhumb line of constant bearing plots as a straight line. Option A is wrong on both counts: the projection is not conical, and it badly exaggerates area in the higher latitudes, which is the standard criticism of it. Option C is wrong because zenithal or azimuthal projections are drawn on a plane tangent to the globe and are used mainly for the polar regions, and Mercator's does not keep distances true. Option D is wrong because it combines the wrong family with a property the projection does not claim; its usefulness in navigation comes from bearings being preserved everywhere, not only at the poles.

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 B, gold. The Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg has produced a large share of all the gold ever mined, from conglomerate reefs that dip deep underground, and the city of Johannesburg itself grew out of the gold rush of 1886.

Option A, diamond, is the wrong mineral for this place but the right one for Kimberley, also in South Africa, where the volcanic pipe gave its name to kimberlite rock, and for Mirny in the Russian republic of Yakutia. Option C, copper, belongs to Chile and to the Central African Copperbelt. Option D, tin, belongs to the South-East Asian belt through Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia and to Bolivia. South Africa should be remembered for gold at Witwatersrand, diamonds at Kimberley and platinum and chromium in the Bushveld Complex.

The correct answer is B, rainfall. An isohyet joins points receiving the same amount of precipitation over a stated period, and rainfall maps of India are drawn with isohyets to mark the wet and dry belts. Option A is wrong because a line of equal temperature is an isotherm, used on temperature and climate maps. Option C is wrong because a line of equal atmospheric pressure is an isobar, the line on which weather maps are built and from which pressure gradients and winds are read. Option D is wrong because a line of equal duration of sunshine is an isohel, which is the pair most often confused with isohyet in examinations. Two more worth remembering are the isoneph for equal cloudiness and the isobath for equal depth of water.

The correct answer is B, Osaka. Osaka, in the Kansai industrial region, became the leading cotton textile centre of Japan, helped by a humid climate suited to spinning, a good harbour, cheap labour drawn from the countryside and a large home market, and the comparison with Manchester in England, the original Cottonopolis, is standard in textbooks.

Option A, Tokyo, with Yokohama, is the heart of the Kanto region and is known for engineering, printing, electronics and consumer goods rather than for cotton. Option C, Nagoya, is the centre of the Chukyo region and of the automobile and aircraft industries, and also of pottery. Option D, Yokohama, is the port and shipbuilding city of the Tokyo region. Only Osaka carries the Manchester comparison, just as Ahmedabad is called the Manchester of India.

The correct answer is B, a steep slope. Since the contour interval is constant on a sheet, the horizontal distance between two contours measures how far one must walk to rise by that fixed height; a short distance therefore means a rapid rise, that is a steep slope. Option A is wrong because a gentle slope shows the opposite pattern, with contours spread widely apart. Option C is wrong because a plain has very few contours at all, and those far apart, since there is little change in height. Option D is wrong because the flat top of a plateau is shown by widely spaced or absent contours, with closely spaced contours only along its steep edges or scarp. Contours that actually merge indicate a cliff or a vertical face, and a V pointing upstream marks a valley.