Geography Mixed Quiz: Set 96

The magnetic field has flipped many times and life changed the early air, but the young Earth had almost no free oxygen.

Albania lies on the Adriatic, Kazakhstan on the Caspian and Morocco on the Mediterranean. The Adriatic Sea separates Italy from the Balkan coast of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania.

The major languages of India belong to four language families: Indo-European (Indo-Aryan), Dravidian, Austric (Austro-Asiatic) and Sino-Tibetan. The Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family is the largest, spoken by about three-quarters of Indians and including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Odia.

Rows 3 and 4 are correct; rows 1 and 2 have the wrong region or type. Fold mountains form when plates converge and layers of rock crumple.

Boulders and large pebbles are too heavy to be lifted by the water, so the river rolls, slides and drags them along its bed; this is traction.

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.

Constant heat and heavy rain make decomposition fastest there, and climbers and epiphytes are its typical plant forms. Tropical rain forests lie near the equator, in the Amazon, the Congo basin and South-East Asia, with temperatures around 27°C and rain in every month.

The western coastal plain is narrow, steep and submergent, so the rivers of the Western Ghats reach the sea through estuaries rather than deltas, and the drowned valleys give deep natural harbours such as Mumbai, Marmagao, New Mangalore and Kochi, besides the Kerala backwaters called kayals.

Botswana is rich in diamonds, Chile in lithium and Indonesia in nickel. Botswana is one of the world's leading producers of diamonds by value; the Jwaneng and Orapa mines, run with De Beers, turned it from one of the poorest countries at independence in 1966 into a middle-income one.

Sugarcane needs plenty of water through a long growing season, so it is grown under irrigation or in high-rainfall areas, not as a dryland crop.

Lebanon and Syria have coastlines on the eastern Mediterranean; Jordan and Iraq do not. The eastern shore of the Mediterranean, called the Levant coast, runs from Turkey in the north through Syria, Lebanon and Israel to the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

The Pennar river cut the Gandikota gorge through the Erramala hills in the Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh. Gandikota is often called the Grand Canyon of India.

Poland and Germany are members of the European Union, while Belarus and Switzerland are not. Germany is one of the six founding members of the European Communities set up in the 1950s, which grew into the EU under the Maastricht Treaty of 1993.

The Deccan Traps, the vast lava plateau of the north-western peninsula, were laid down by eruptions at the close of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago.

Heat from the Earth's interior sets up slow convection currents in the mantle, and these drag the rigid plates resting on it.

Italy, Japan and South Korea all have fertility rates far below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman, ageing people and shrinking numbers.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed at Karachi on 19 September 1960 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India and President Mohammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan, after nine years of negotiation begun in 1952 through the good offices of the World Bank, which signed the treaty as a third party.

The Aravalli range of Rajasthan and Haryana is an old or relict fold mountain, folded in the Precambrian era and worn down by erosion to low, rounded hills; Guru Shikhar on Mount Abu is its highest point.

Physiological density divides the total population by the area of arable or net cultivated land, showing how many people each unit of farmland must support.

In Koppen's scheme for India, most of the Ganga plain falls in the Cwg type: a monsoon climate with a dry winter.