Haryana Mixed Quiz: Set 2

The Ghaggar enters Haryana from the Shivalik, flows south-west past Kaithal and Fatehabad and is checked at the Ottu weir in Sirsa district, from which canals take its water; beyond that point its dry bed continues into Rajasthan, where it is lost in the sand.

Haryana covers 44,212 square kilometres, about 1.34 per cent of the area of India, which makes it one of the smaller states by size even though it is among the most urbanised and the most productive per hectare in the country.

Sultanpur National Park lies in Gurugram district, near Sultanpur village on the Gurugram-Jhajjar road, and it is a shallow seasonal wetland that fills in the monsoon and draws large numbers of migratory waterbirds on the Central Asian Flyway.

The Yamuna comes down from Yamunotri, enters Haryana near Kalesar in Yamunanagar district and flows south along the eastern boundary of the state with Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.

The Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, a research institute under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, is at Karnal. It works on reclaiming salt-affected and alkaline land, on gypsum treatment and subsurface drainage, and on salt-tolerant crop varieties, all problems that Haryana's canal-irrigated districts face directly.

The loo is the hot, dry wind that blows from the west and north-west over the plains of Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh in May and June.

It lies in Kaithal district and is the largest wildlife sanctuary in Haryana by area, a plantation and scrub tract along the old course associated with the Saraswati, created to restore tree cover and wildlife on land that had little of either.

Sultanpur National Park stands near Farrukhnagar in Gurugram district, on the road from Gurugram to Jhajjar. It is a shallow freshwater lake ringed by grassland and scrub, the best known protected area of Haryana, and it draws thousands of migratory waterbirds every winter.

The low, broken, rocky ridges of Gurugram, Nuh, Faridabad, Rewari and Mahendragarh are the worn northern end of the Aravalli, the oldest fold mountain system of India, which continues into Delhi as the Ridge.

Haryana lies between these parallels and between 74 degrees 28 minutes east and 77 degrees 36 minutes east longitude. Its position far north of the Tropic of Cancer and far from the sea explains the state's continental climate, with very hot summers and cold winters.

Bhindawas lies in Jhajjar district and is a man-made wetland fed by drainage and canal water. It is the largest wetland in Haryana, is an important wintering ground for waterbirds, and in 2021 it was listed as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention along with Sultanpur.

The Hathnikund barrage stands on the Yamuna in Yamunanagar district, where the river leaves the hills, and it replaced the older Tajewala headworks a short distance upstream.

In the national division of the country into agro-climatic regions, the Trans-Gangetic Plains region covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and the Ganganagar tract of Rajasthan.

The Shivalik districts of Panchkula, Ambala and Yamunanagar in the north-east catch the first of the monsoon against the foothills and receive the heaviest rain of the state, while the south-western districts of Sirsa, Bhiwani and Mahendragarh lie towards the dry Thar margin and receive the least.

Bir Shikargah Wildlife Sanctuary lies in the Shivalik tract of Panchkula district. The name itself explains its origin: a bir is an enclosed woodlot and shikargah means a hunting ground, so the area was a hunting preserve of the princely period that was later turned into a protected area.

Kalesar National Park lies in the Shivalik foothills of Yamunanagar district at the north-eastern corner of Haryana, where the state meets Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand along the Yamuna.

Along with Fatehabad and Mahendragarh, these districts form the bagar belt, where sand carried in from the Thar makes dunes and sandy soil, rainfall drops to about 30 centimetres and no perennial stream flows.

The Sahibi rises in the Aravalli hills of Rajasthan, flows north-east across Rewari and Gurugram and ends in the Najafgarh jheel on the Haryana-Delhi border; from there the Najafgarh drain carries its water into the Yamuna.

The peepal, Ficus religiosa, is the state tree of Haryana. It is a long-lived tree of the plain, planted at village meeting places and shrines, and the state's scheme that pays a pension for the care of very old trees protects many peepals among them.

The blackbuck is the state animal of Haryana and survives in the open scrub and grassland of Sirsa, Hisar, Bhiwani and Rewari, where sanctuaries such as Abubshahar and Nahar protect it, helped in the south-west by the Bishnoi tradition of protecting wildlife.