World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The Indo-Gangetic plain is India's most fertile region. It is built of deep alluvium brought down by the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra and renewed by their floods, and it is almost perfectly level and easily irrigated.

It occupies only about a quarter of India's area but supports nearly half its people.

Answer: A

The biosphere is a thin shell, reaching about 8 to 10 km above the surface and a comparable distance into the ocean deeps.

Above that the air is too thin and cold, and the ultraviolet radiation too intense, for life to persist. Almost all living things in fact occupy a far narrower band close to the surface.

Answer: D

There are seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia.

They are listed here in descending order of area, from Asia's 44.6 million km² down to Australia's 7.7 million.

Answer: B

The great Indian mica belt runs along the Chhotanagpur plateau, and its major part lies in Bihar and the area now in Jharkhand, around Koderma, Giridih and Hazaribagh.

Andhra Pradesh (Nellore) and Rajasthan also produce mica, but on a much smaller scale.

Answer: A

The Mediterranean regions are known as the lands of the three W's - wheat, wool and wine. Their hot dry summers and mild wet winters suit winter-sown wheat, deep-rooted vines and olives, and sheep grazing on the dry scrub.

The same climate is found in California, central Chile, the Cape and southern Australia as well as around the Mediterranean itself.

Answer: A

Outward from the Sun the order is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

The four inner planets are small and rocky; beyond the asteroid belt come the four giants. Uranus comes before Neptune, and Earth before Mars, which is where the other options go wrong.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Africa

The Strait of Gibraltar divides Spain from Morocco, and so separates Europe from Africa. It is only about 14 km wide at its narrowest, and it is the sole natural link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. That narrowness matters oceanographically: the Mediterranean loses far more water to evaporation than its rivers supply, so a surface current runs steadily in from the Atlantic while denser, saltier water flows out beneath it. Geologically the strait is young. Around five million years ago it was closed, the Mediterranean largely dried out, and the Atlantic then broke back through in what is called the Zanclean flood. Europe is separated from Asia not by a strait but by the Ural Mountains and the Bosporus, which is a different waterway altogether.

Answer: A

South America covers about 17,819,000 km², making it the fourth largest continent.

It stretches about 7,400 km from the Caribbean to Cape Horn, and contains both the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, and its driest desert, the Atacama.

Answer: C

In the southern hemisphere land covers only about a fifth of the surface, giving a land-to-ocean ratio of roughly 1 to 4. It is often called the water hemisphere for this reason.

The northern hemisphere is far more balanced, at close to 1 to 1.5, because almost all of Eurasia and North America lie there.

Answer: D

Multi-purpose river projects aim at all of these together - irrigation from stored water, hydroelectric power, and flood control with improved navigation. Serving several ends at once is what makes them multi-purpose.