Geography Quiz: Types of Mountains, Plateaus and Plains

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.

Block mountains are formed by tensional forces that break the crust along faults; the block left standing between or beside the faults is called a horst and the sunken trough is a graben or rift valley.

Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is a dormant volcano built up by repeated eruptions of lava and ash around its vents, and at 5,895 metres it is the highest point in Africa.

Lying between the Himalayas on the south and the Kunlun on the north, it is an intermontane plateau, the highest and the largest in the world, with an average elevation of about four and a half thousand metres, which is why it is called the Roof of the World.

The Deccan Trap was built by fissure eruptions of highly fluid basalt lava towards the close of the Cretaceous period, which spread as sheet after sheet over a vast area of western and central India; the weathering of that basalt gives the black cotton soil, also called regur.

The Bhabar is a narrow belt of eight to sixteen kilometres along the foot of the Shiwaliks, laid with pebbles and gravel brought down by the rivers; it is so permeable that the smaller streams sink into it and vanish.

Khadar is the low-lying newer alluvium that the rivers flood and renew nearly every year, so it is free of lime nodules, rich in fine silt and the most productive land of the plain; in Punjab the Khadar strip along a river is called Bet.

A peneplain, meaning almost a plain, is the end stage of the normal cycle of river erosion in a humid region, when valleys have widened and divides have been worn down until the land lies close to base level, with a few resistant residual hills standing above it.

A piedmont plateau lies at the foot of a mountain range with a plain or the sea on its other side, and it is usually lower than an intermontane plateau; Patagonia lies between the Andes and the Atlantic, and the Piedmont plateau of the United States between the Appalachians and…

Residual or relict mountains are what is left when a plateau or an old mountain mass is worn down for a very long time and only the hardest rock stands out; the Nilgiri in the Western Ghats, Parasnath in Jharkhand, Girnar in Gujarat and the Rajmahal hills are the Indian…

Dhupgarh, about 1,350 metres high, stands in the Pachmarhi hills of Madhya Pradesh and is the highest peak of the Satpura range, which is a block mountain bounded by faults along the Narmada and the Tapi.

Anamudi, about 2,695 metres high, rises in the Anaimalai hills of the Idukki district of Kerala and is the highest peak of the Western Ghats and of the whole peninsular plateau south of the Himalayas; the Eravikulam National Park around it shelters the Nilgiri tahr.