Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

The most diverse family is Tibeto-Burman.

The Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family is spoken by relatively small populations along the Himalaya and in north-east India, but it contains by far the largest number of distinct languages, many of them spoken by single tribes in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram.

The Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families have many more speakers but fewer separate languages, and the Austro-Asiatic family, which includes the Munda languages and Khasi, is also smaller in number of languages.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

The statement that is not a characteristic of culture is Culture is hereditary.

Culture is learned, not inherited biologically. A child acquires the language, beliefs, customs and skills of the society it grows up in through socialisation, and a child raised in another society would acquire that society's culture instead.

The other three are standard characteristics. Culture is dynamic, changing over time through invention and diffusion; it is adaptive, helping people adjust to their environment; and it is symbolic, built on language and shared symbols that carry meaning.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

Statements (1), (3) and (4) are true, so the answer is (1), (3) and (4) are true.

Mark Jefferson's law of the primate city (1939) describes a city that is disproportionately large (1) and exceptionally larger than the second city of its country or region (3), and dominant in its economic, political and cultural life. India has such cities at the state level, for example Kolkata in West Bengal (4).

Statement (2) is false: a primate city is defined by its size and dominance, not by religion. Bangkok, Paris and Mexico City are primate cities without being religious centres. Every option including (2), or leaving out (4), is wrong.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The Montreal Protocol is related to ozone depletion.

Signed in 1987 under the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (1985), it phases out the production and use of ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), halons and carbon tetrachloride. It is widely regarded as the most successful environmental treaty, and the ozone layer is now recovering.

Global warming is addressed by the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Acid rain was tackled by agreements such as the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979), and water pollution by separate conventions.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

Podzolization is common in cool and moist climates.

A podzol forms where rainfall exceeds evaporation and the litter, typically from coniferous trees in the boreal forest, decomposes slowly into acid humus. Acid water percolating down leaches iron, aluminium and bases from the upper horizon, leaving a bleached, ash-grey E horizon, and redeposits them below in a dark, reddish B horizon.

Warm and humid climates favour laterization, where silica is leached and iron and aluminium stay behind. Dry climates, warm or cool, have too little downward water movement for strong leaching and instead accumulate carbonates (calcification).

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

The key gives Dust storms.

A turbidity current is a density current: a flow made heavier than its surroundings by the sediment it carries in suspension, which then moves along the ground under gravity. In arid regions the atmospheric counterpart is the dust storm, such as the haboob of the Sudan, where a mass of cold, dust-laden air advances along the ground as a dense wall, so dust storms are the arid form of such currents.

A thunderstorm is a convective cloud system, a tornado a narrow rotating vortex and a cyclone a large low-pressure system. None of them is defined by a load of suspended sediment moving as a density current.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

The correct matching is a-3, b-4, c-2, d-1.

• Continental shelf: widest off broad lowland coasts, where the land's gentle slope continues under the sea.
• Continental slope: marked by an abrupt change of gradient at the edge of the shelf.
• Ocean deeps: the trenches, the deepest parts of the ocean, the paper giving 3,000 to 5,000 fathoms.
• Deep sea plains: the abyssal plains, covering about two-thirds of the ocean floor.

The other options give the abrupt gradient change, or the two-thirds coverage, to the wrong feature.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

The mean is called the most balanced measure because the sum of deviations from it equals zero.

For any set of values, the deviations above the arithmetic mean exactly cancel those below it:

\[ \sum_{i=1}^{n} (x_{i} - \bar{x}) = 0 \]

The mean is therefore the point at which the data balance, like the centre of gravity of weights placed along a beam, and that property is what 'balanced' refers to.

The other options are wrong or beside the point. The centre of the range is the mid-range, which the mean need not equal. All values do take part in calculating the mean, but that makes it comprehensive rather than balanced. And the mean is strongly affected by extreme values, which is its chief weakness compared with the median.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The key gives L. C. King as the critic who said that the senile man talked about the senile landscape of W. M. Davis.

Davis described a landscape as passing through youth, maturity and old age, ending in a low, nearly flat peneplain, which he called the stage of 'senility'. Lester C. King, the South African geomorphologist, was one of the sharpest opponents of this scheme: he argued that scarps retreat in parallel and that landscapes evolve by pediplanation, not by down-wearing to a peneplain. That fits a sarcastic remark about 'senile landscapes'.

Walther Penck also opposed Davis, but his objection was that uplift and denudation go on together. R. J. Chorley wrote a critical history of Davis's ideas, and Wooldridge worked in the English Davisian tradition, so neither suits as well. I could not trace the exact remark to a named source, so the attribution to King rests on the official key and on King's known stance; treat it as the keyed reading, not a quotation confirmed from the original.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

Jointed and faulted rocks develop a rectangular drainage pattern.

Joints and faults are zones of weakness that streams erode preferentially. Where two sets of fractures cross at roughly right angles, the main streams and their tributaries follow them and join at right angles, giving a rectangular pattern.

A parallel pattern forms on a uniform, steep slope, a centripetal pattern drains into a central basin or crater, and a dendritic, tree-like pattern forms on uniform rocks with no structural control.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

These statements are associated with Revenstein, that is, E. G. Ravenstein.

In his 'Laws of Migration' (1885 and 1889), based on the British census, Ravenstein observed that most migrants move only a short distance, that migration proceeds step by step, that those going long distances generally head for great centres of commerce and industry, and that each current of migration produces a counter-current. The three statements in the question are among those laws.

The others developed later models. Everett Lee (1966) framed migration as a balance of push and pull factors at origin and destination with intervening obstacles. Wilbur Zelinsky (1971) proposed the hypothesis of the mobility transition linking migration to the demographic transition. Michael Todaro, presumably meant by 'Tadora', modelled rural-urban migration through expected urban income.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

The bottom-up order is (3) (4) (1) (2): micro-minor, minor, meso, macro.

Planning regions form a hierarchy by size. At the bottom are the micro-minor units such as villages and village clusters, then the minor (micro) level such as blocks and tehsils, then the meso level such as districts, and at the top the macro level of states and large multi-state regions.

The other codes either start from the meso or macro level, which would be top-down or mixed, or put the minor level below the micro-minor level, which inverts the bottom two.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

The copper city is Malajkhand.

The Malanjkhand Copper Project of Hindustan Copper Limited, in Balaghat district, works the largest copper deposit in India through a large open-cast mine, which is why the town is called the copper city of Madhya Pradesh.

Hindustan Copper's other main units are at Khetri in Rajasthan and Ghatsila in Jharkhand. The other places named are not the site of this project.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The state with negative population growth in the 2011 Census was Nagaland.

Nagaland's population fell from about 19.9 lakh in 2001 to about 19.8 lakh in 2011, a decadal growth of roughly -0.6 percent, the only state to record a decline. Part of the explanation offered was that the 2001 count had been inflated, so the 2011 figure corrected it.

Kerala grew slowly (about 4.9 percent) but still grew. Goa (about 8 percent) and Haryana (about 20 percent) also recorded positive growth.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

From north to south the order is (4), (2), (3), (1).

1. Juan de Fuca plate: off Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, about 45° N.
2. Cocos plate: off Central America, roughly 0-15° N.
3. Nazca plate: off western South America, roughly 0-40° S.
4. Scotia plate: between South America and Antarctica, about 55-60° S.

The Scotia plate is the southernmost, so options that do not end with it are wrong, and the Cocos plate lies north of the Nazca plate.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

The pair not correctly matched is Budha Ghag - Mahanadi.

Budha Ghag, also called Lodh Falls, is the highest waterfall in Jharkhand, on the Burha river in Latehar district. It is not on the Mahanadi.

The other pairs are correct. Dhuandhar falls is on the Narmada at Bhedaghat near Jabalpur, Dudhsagar falls is on the Mandovi on the Goa-Karnataka border, and Gokak falls is on the Ghataprabha in Belagavi district of Karnataka.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

Pairs 1, 3 and 4 are correctly matched, so the answer is 1, 3 and 4 only.

• Chitrakoot Falls in Chhattisgarh is on the Indravati.
• Jog Falls in Karnataka is on the Sharavathi.
• Athirappilly Falls in Thrissur district, Kerala, is on the Chalakudy river.

Pair 2 is wrong. Dudhsagar Falls on the Goa-Karnataka border is on the Mandovi river, not the Zuari. That rules out the options including pair 2.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

Jharkhand fares poorly in canal irrigation because the area is hilly.

Most of the state lies on the undulating Chotanagpur plateau. Rivers run fast in deep, rocky channels, and the broken terrain makes it hard and costly to build large canal networks that need gentle, continuous slopes. Farmers therefore depend on tanks, wells and small check dams.

Forest cover and dry farming are consequences or features of that landscape, not the reason canals fail, and rainfall of over 1,000 mm is not sufficient for assured cropping, since it is seasonal and runs off quickly.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The correct matching is a-iii, b-iv, c-ii, d-i.

• Coniferous forests are softwood evergreen trees such as pine, fir and spruce, whose soft wood is used for pulp and paper.
• Mediterranean vegetation grows on the west and south-west margins of the continents, around the Mediterranean Sea and in places such as California and south-west Australia.
• Tropical evergreen forests are made up of hardwood trees such as rosewood, ebony and mahogany.
• Temperate evergreen forests grow on the eastern margins of the continents in the mid-latitudes, for example in south-east USA and south China.

Only option B has all four pairs. The options pairing coniferous forests with eastern margins, or tropical evergreen forests with softwood, reverse these facts.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

New crust is continually added by seafloor spreading.

At mid-ocean ridges, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, tectonic plates move apart and magma rises from the mantle, cools and forms new oceanic crust. The ocean floor spreads outward from the ridge, so the youngest rocks lie at the ridge and the oldest farther away, as Harry Hess proposed in the 1960s.

Subduction does the opposite, destroying crust as one plate sinks beneath another. Earthquakes are the result of plate movement, not a process that adds crust, and convection in the mantle drives plate motion but does not itself create crust.