In a region of heavy rainfall and frequent floods, villages built on raised dry ground are called

The correct answer is D, the presence of a municipality or a notified town area committee. A place that has a municipal corporation, a municipality, a cantonment board or a notified town area committee is a statutory town, and it is urban whatever its population; it is therefore not a census town at all. A census town is a place with no such body that satisfies three tests together, which are exactly the other three options: A, a population of at least five thousand; B, at least seventy-five per cent of the male main working population in non-agricultural work; and C, a density of at least four hundred persons per square kilometre. All three must be met at once, so a large but farming village remains rural. The distinction between a statutory town and a census town is the single most tested point in this chapter.

The correct answer is C, which names a compact pattern. The Ganga-Yamuna Doab is a level alluvial plain with deep fertile soil, assured water from wells, canals and a high water table, and a long history of dense farming settlement, so its villages are compact or nucleated: the houses stand packed together in one block with narrow lanes, and the fields lie all around. A, scattered, is wrong because a scattered or dispersed pattern belongs to hilly and forested country such as Meghalaya, Uttarakhand and the hills of Kerala, where terrain and small patches of cultivable land keep farmsteads apart. B, random, is wrong because it describes no recognised pattern of Indian rural settlement. D, semi sprinkled, is wrong because a semi-clustered or fragmented pattern is typical of the Gujarat plain and parts of Rajasthan, where one compact core is joined by a few clusters set some distance away.

The correct answer is A, Class I. The Census of India groups towns into six classes by population: Class I of one hundred thousand and above, Class II of fifty thousand to ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, Class III of twenty thousand to forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, Class IV of ten thousand to nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, Class V of five thousand to nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, and Class VI of less than five thousand. So B, C and D are all wrong for a town of a lakh, and each belongs to a smaller band as listed. A further step beyond Class I is worth remembering: a city of a million or more is called a metropolitan city, and one of five million or more a megacity.

The correct answer is B, only statement B is true. Statement B is sound: for the poor and for people of the lower castes, the new jobs in colonial cities were a way out of the control of upper-caste landowners in the village and of the daily humiliation they suffered there, and this pull is part of every account of colonial urbanisation. The first statement is false because of the word only: it was not only the rich who left the villages for work in the growing cities, and in fact the poor and the landless formed the bulk of the migration to mills, docks, railways and construction sites. So option A, which calls the first statement true, is wrong, and option C, which calls both false, is wrong because the second statement is true. Option D, which calls both true, is wrong for the same reason as A.

The correct answer is B, Patrick Geddes. The Scottish geographer and town planner Patrick Geddes coined the word conurbation in 1915 for a great urban mass formed when separate towns grow outward until their built-up areas merge, as in Greater London or the Ruhr. A, Jean Gottmann, is the main trap: he gave the term megalopolis in 1957 for an even larger super-metropolitan belt, such as the chain from Boston to Washington. C, Ebenezer Howard, is wrong because his contribution was the garden city idea, a planned town ringed by a green belt, which influenced the planning of New Delhi and of several Indian townships. D, Lewis Mumford, is wrong because he wrote on the history and culture of cities rather than giving this term; he did, however, popularise Geddes's ideas.