Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 61

The correct answer is C, Lake Superior. The Mesabi Range in Minnesota lies on the western side of Lake Superior, and the ore is carried by lake steamer to the steel towns of the lower lakes, among them Gary, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where it meets Appalachian coal. That meeting of lake transport, ore and coal built the American steel industry.

Option A, Lake Michigan, has steel towns such as Gary on its shore but no iron ore range. Option B, Lake Erie, serves the Cleveland and Buffalo steel plants, again as a consumer of the ore. Option D, Lake Ontario, lies farthest east, below Niagara Falls, and is linked to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The habit worth forming is to pair an ore area with the route by which the ore reaches the furnace.

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, IRS-1A, 1988. It was the first satellite of the Indian Remote Sensing series and marked the beginning of operational earth observation for agriculture, forestry, water resources and land use in India. Option A is wrong because Aryabhata, launched in 1975, was India's first satellite and carried experiments in astronomy and physics, not an earth observation payload of the operational kind. Option B is wrong but close: Bhaskara-I of 1979 was India's first experimental earth observation satellite, and the word operational in the question is what separates it from IRS-1A. Option D is wrong because Cartosat-1, launched in 2005, came much later in the programme and was built for high-resolution cartographic mapping, by which time the Indian Remote Sensing series was long established.

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, Indonesia, where shifting cultivation, together with Malaysia, is called ladang. The practice means clearing a patch of forest, burning the slash for ash, cropping it for two or three years until the soil is exhausted and then moving to a fresh patch.

Option A, Mexico, and Central America call it milpa, a system in which maize, beans and squash are grown together. Option B, Sri Lanka, calls it chena. Option D, Brazil, calls it roca, practised in the Amazon basin. The other names worth memorising are jhum in north-east India, taungya in Myanmar, chitemene in parts of central Africa and masole in the Congo basin. Questions on this topic are almost always a straight match between the local name and the country.

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 C, RADAR. An active sensor generates its own energy, sends it to the target and measures what returns; RADAR does this with microwaves and LiDAR with a laser pulse, which is why such sensors can image at night and, in the case of microwaves, through cloud, haze and smoke. Option A is wrong because an aerial camera depends on sunlight falling on the ground and is therefore passive. Option B is wrong for the same reason: a multispectral scanner that records reflected sunlight supplies no energy of its own. Option D is wrong because a thermal sensor records the radiation the earth itself emits, which again is energy the sensor did not produce, so it is passive even though it can work at night. The dividing line is the source of the energy, not the time of day.

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, the Amazon basin. The rubber tree is native to the equatorial forests of Brazil, and the boom of the nineteenth century made Manaus a wealthy city. Seeds taken to Kew Gardens in London were raised and sent to Ceylon and Malaya, and the plantations of South-East Asia soon overtook wild rubber from the Amazon.

Option A, the Congo basin, has a similar climate and produced wild rubber under a brutal concession system, but the tree is not native there. Option C, the Malay peninsula, is where the plantation industry grew largest, so it is the most tempting answer, but the tree is an introduction there. Option D, the Western Ghats, is a region of Indian rubber estates in Kerala, again a plantation area and not the home of the species. Rubber needs more than 200 centimetres of rain and no dry season.

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, about 36,000 km above the equator. At that height a satellite's orbital period equals the period of the earth's rotation, so it stays above the same point on the equator and appears fixed in the sky, which is what communication and weather satellites need. Option A is wrong because a few hundred kilometres is the range of the near-polar sun-synchronous orbits used by earth observation satellites, which cross the equator at the same local time on each pass. Option B is wrong because at ten thousand kilometres the period is far shorter than a day and the satellite would drift across the sky. Option D is wrong because one lakh kilometres is well beyond the geostationary belt and the satellite's period would be much longer than a day.

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 A, Iowa and Illinois. The Corn Belt lies in the central lowland of the United States, where warm summer nights, 50 to 100 centimetres of summer rain and deep well-drained loam suit maize, and most of the crop is fed to pigs and cattle, so the belt is also a livestock and meat region.

Option B, Texas and Louisiana, belong to the old Cotton Belt of the south, now also a region of rice, sugarcane and oil. Option C, California and Oregon, are Mediterranean and marine west coast in climate, known for fruit, vines, vegetables and timber. Option D, Florida and Georgia, grow citrus fruit, groundnut and tobacco. Keeping the Corn Belt, the Cotton Belt, the Wheat Belt of the Great Plains and the Dairy Belt of the north-east apart is the real work in this question.

The correct answer is B, the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, under which the Inland Waterways Authority of India functions. Shipping and navigation on inland waterways declared by Parliament to be national waterways is a Union List subject, which is why a central Act is needed to declare each waterway. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Jal Shakti handles water resources, river development, irrigation and drinking water, not navigation. Option C is wrong because road transport and highways is a separate ministry, although multi-modal terminals link waterways to highways. Option D is wrong because the environment ministry only grants clearances for dredging and terminal construction. Candidates often answer Jal Shakti because the subject involves rivers, and that is the trap. Remember the chain: the Union List entry, then the ministry, then the Authority created by the 1985 Act, which is the order in which this topic is set.

The correct answer is B, Hyderabad. The National Remote Sensing Centre, a centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation, works from Hyderabad and operates the earth station at Shadnagar nearby, where data from Indian and foreign satellites is received. Option A is wrong because Bengaluru is the headquarters of ISRO itself and the location of the U. R. Rao Satellite Centre, where satellites are built. Option C is wrong because Ahmedabad is the home of the Space Applications Centre, which develops payloads and applications. Option D is wrong because Dehradun is the headquarters of the Survey of India, the topographical mapping agency, and also of the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, which is a training and research institute rather than the data centre. Remember the three cities together: Bengaluru for ISRO headquarters, Ahmedabad for the Space Applications Centre and Hyderabad for the National Remote Sensing Centre, with Dehradun for the Survey of India.

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, wheat. All three are temperate grasslands with 50 to 75 centimetres of rain, a cool moist growing season and a warm dry harvest, which is exactly what wheat needs, and all three are farmed on large mechanised holdings for export. The Ukrainian steppe and the Canadian Prairie provinces belong to the same group.

Option A, rice, needs high heat and over 100 centimetres of rain with standing water, so it belongs to the deltas and plains of monsoon Asia. Option C, rubber, needs equatorial rain throughout the year and grows in South-East Asia. Option D, coffee, needs frost-free tropical highland slopes, as in the Brazilian plateau and the Colombian Andes. The grasslands question is answered by remembering that temperate grassland means grain and ranching.

The correct answer is D, spatial resolution. It is usually expressed as the ground size of one pixel, so a sensor of one metre resolution can separate objects about a metre across, which is what makes high-resolution imagery useful for urban mapping. Option A is wrong because spectral resolution refers to the number of wavelength bands recorded and how narrow each is, which decides how finely different materials can be told apart. Option B is wrong because radiometric resolution is the sensitivity of the sensor to differences in the strength of the signal, expressed in the number of levels or bits. Option C is wrong because temporal resolution is the interval after which the same area is imaged again, which matters for watching a crop grow or a flood spread. All four together describe the quality of a data set.

The correct answer is A, West Africa. Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria grow most of the world's cocoa, on small farms under shade trees in the hot, wet equatorial belt along the Gulf of Guinea. The crop came from tropical America, where it was first used by the Maya and the Aztecs, and was brought to West Africa in the nineteenth century.

Option B, South-East Asia, grows rubber, oil palm, coffee and spices, and Indonesia does grow cocoa, but the region is not the main source. Option C, Central Europe, is too cold for a tree that cannot bear frost, though it is a great processing region for chocolate. Option D, Central Asia, is dry continental land of cotton and wheat under irrigation. The pairing to remember is cocoa with the Gulf of Guinea coast, as coffee goes with Brazil and tea with Assam and Sri Lanka.

The correct answer is A. A cadastral map is a very large-scale map of a village or a town drawn to register plots, fields, their boundaries and their owners, and it is the basis of land revenue records and of the registration of property. Option B is wrong because a rainfall map is a thematic or distribution map, drawn on a small scale with isohyets. Option C is wrong because air routes appear on small-scale route or atlas maps, where detail of the ground is deliberately left out. Option D is wrong because relief is shown on topographical maps with contours, and the words small scale make it doubly wrong, since cadastral maps are the largest-scale maps in regular use. The word cadastre itself means a register of property, which is the easiest way to remember it.