Geography Quiz: Transcontinental Railways, Sea Routes and Ports of the World

The southernmost of India's major ports is V. O. Chidambaranar Port, long known as Tuticorin, which lies on the Gulf of Mannar in the Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu.

It runs across Russia from St Petersburg and Moscow in the west to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, a distance of about 9,289 km from Moscow, and no other single railway line in the world is as long.

The line begins in European Russia and runs eastward across the whole of Siberia, and Vladivostok is both its terminus and the principal Russian naval and commercial port on the Pacific.

The Suez Canal was cut across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt and opened in 1869.

It crosses the isthmus of Central America, where the land rises well above sea level, so ships cannot simply be floated through.

The Northern Atlantic Sea Route links the north-eastern seaboard of North America with the industrial countries of western Europe, and because the two most developed manufacturing regions of the world face each other across this stretch of ocean it carries more traffic than any other sea route.

The Australian Trans-Continental Railway runs for about 4,000 km from Perth on the west coast to Sydney on the east, and on its way it crosses the Nullarbor Plain, a flat treeless limestone surface in the south of the continent.

Rotterdam stands on the delta where the Rhine and the Meuse reach the North Sea, which gives it inland waterway access to the industrial heart of Germany, Switzerland and France.

In the age of coal and later of oil, long ocean voyages had to be broken at fixed points where a ship could take on fuel, fresh water and provisions, and settlements at those points grew into ports.

A packet station handles short-distance traffic across a narrow stretch of water, carrying passengers, mail and vehicles rather than bulk cargo.

The Trans-Andean Railway was built to join the Pacific coast of South America to the Atlantic coast, running from the Chilean port of Valparaiso across the Andes to Buenos Aires in Argentina.

The Kiel Canal is cut across the neck of the Jutland peninsula in northern Germany and allows ships to pass between the North Sea and the Baltic without sailing all the way round Denmark, saving several hundred kilometres and avoiding the rough waters off the Skagerrak.