Mizoram became a full state of the Indian Union on which date?

The correct answer is B, Imphal. Imphal lies in the valley at the centre of Manipur, surrounded by hills, and holds the Kangla Fort, the old seat of the Meitei kings, and Ima Keithel, the market run entirely by women. Option A is wrong; Aizawl is the capital of Mizoram, which stands on a long ridge and from which the Tropic of Cancer passes close by. Option C is wrong; Shillong is the capital of Meghalaya and was the capital of undivided Assam until 1972, when Meghalaya was separated and Assam moved its capital to Dispur. Option D is wrong; Kohima is the capital of Nagaland and is remembered for the battle fought there in 1944, though its nearness to Manipur makes it a natural distractor. Imphal is also where the Indian National Army campaign of 1944 was directed, and Moirang in the same state saw the flag raised in April of that year.

The correct answer is C, Manipur. Keibul Lamjao lies in the southern part of Loktak Lake and rests on phumdis, floating mats of soil, roots and decaying vegetation thick enough to carry animals and even huts; nowhere else in the world is a national park built on such a surface. It was created to protect the sangai, the brow-antlered deer that is the state animal of Manipur. Option A is wrong; the national parks of Meghalaya are Nokrek and Balphakram, both in the Garo hills and both on solid ground. Option B is wrong; Assam has Kaziranga and Manas, famous for the one-horned rhinoceros and for the tiger reserve on the Bhutan border, but no floating park. Option D is wrong; Mizoram has Phawngpui Blue Mountain National Park and Murlen National Park, which lie in high hill country.

The correct answer is A, phumdi. A phumdi is a mat of soil, plant matter and organic debris in various stages of decay that floats on the surface of Loktak Lake in Manipur; the largest of them carries Keibul Lamjao National Park, and fishermen build circular enclosures called athaphums from them. Option B is wrong; a beel is an oxbow lake or a wetland of the Brahmaputra and Ganga floodplains, the word used in Assam and Bengal, as in Deepor Beel near Guwahati. Option C is wrong; a chaur is a seasonal waterlogged depression of north Bihar, such as the Kabar Taal in Begusarai. Option D is wrong; jheel is only the general Hindi word for a lake or a marsh and names no particular formation. The specific vocabulary of each region is exactly what this kind of question tests.

The correct answer is A, 21 January 1972. The North-Eastern Areas Reorganisation Act 1971 took effect on that day, turning Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura into full states and creating the Union Territories of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, then called the North East Frontier Agency; the day is observed as statehood day in all three states. Option B is wrong for these three but is the date on which Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh became states, fifteen years later. Option C is wrong; 1 December 1963 is the day Nagaland became the sixteenth state of India, the first of the north-eastern states to be created after independence. Option D is wrong; 16 May 1975 is the day Sikkim became the twenty-second state under the thirty-sixth amendment. Learning these four dates in order answers most questions set on the north-east.

The correct answer is B, Meghalaya. The name is Sanskrit for the home of the clouds and was chosen for the new state in 1972 because of the rainfall of its southern slopes, which face the moist air coming off the Bay of Bengal and receive the heaviest rain in the country at Mawsynram and Cherrapunji. Option A is wrong; Mizoram is called the land of the highlanders or the land of the blue mountains, from Phawngpui, its highest peak. Option B being correct, option C is wrong; Manipur is called the jewelled land or, in a phrase of Jawaharlal Nehru, the jewel of India, from the valley ringed by hills. Option D is wrong; Sikkim is often described as the land of the thunderbolt or, in the Lepcha phrase, the valley of rice, and its mountain Kanchenjunga is the highest in India. These epithets are a standard source of questions in this part of the syllabus.