World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Correct answer: Aluminium

Bauxite is the ore from which nearly all aluminium is produced. It is not a single mineral but a rock made up of aluminium hydroxides, formed by the intense chemical weathering of aluminium-rich rocks in hot, wet tropical conditions - the same process that produces laterite soils, which is why bauxite is often found capping lateritic plateaus. Extraction takes two stages: the Bayer process refines bauxite to alumina, and the Hall–Héroult process electrolyses the alumina to metal. The second is extremely electricity-intensive, which is why smelters are sited near cheap power and why recycling aluminium uses only about 5 per cent of the energy of primary production. India has substantial reserves, chiefly in Odisha, Jharkhand, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, and is among the larger producers. The other metals come from different ores: iron chiefly from haematite and magnetite, copper from chalcopyrite, and zinc from sphalerite.

Answer: B

The deepest place in the Indian Ocean is the Sunda Trench (also called the Java Trench), reaching about 7,290 m south of the Indonesian archipelago.

It marks where the Indo-Australian plate subducts beneath the Eurasian plate - the same boundary that produced the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Subduction zones where one oceanic plate descends beneath another

An island arc forms where one oceanic plate is subducted beneath another. Water carried down with the descending slab lowers the melting point of the mantle above it, generating magma that rises to build a chain of volcanic islands. The chain is curved for a geometric reason: a rigid plate bending into a sphere intersects the surface along an arc. Alongside it lies a deep trench marking where the slab goes down, and earthquakes grow progressively deeper away from the trench, tracing the slab into the mantle. Japan, the Philippines, the Aleutians, the Marianas and Indonesia are all island arcs, and India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands are part of one. Where the overriding plate is continental instead, the same process builds a volcanic mountain chain on land, as in the Andes. Hotspots produce a quite different pattern - a linear chain such as Hawaii, formed as a plate drifts over a stationary mantle plume, with the volcanoes ageing steadily along it.

Answer: A

Day and night are equal all year only at the equator. The circle of illumination cuts every latitude in half only there, so the equator always has twelve hours of daylight and twelve of darkness.

Everywhere else the two are equal on just two days a year, the equinoxes; at the poles the year is one long day and one long night.

Answer: A

Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, at 5,642 m, is the highest point in Europe. Kosciuszko is Australia's highest, McKinley (Denali) North America's and Aconcagua South America's.

Answer: A

India's long maritime contact with the wider world earned it the title mistress of the eastern seas. Its position, projecting into the Indian Ocean along the routes between the Middle East and South-East Asia, made this inevitable.

Answer: A

Antarctica accounts for about 8.2 per cent of the world's land area, some 13.2 million km².

That makes it the fifth largest continent, larger than both Europe and Australia, though almost all of it is buried under ice.

Answer: A

China's Hwang Ho (Huang He) is known as the Yellow River, from the vast quantity of fine yellow loess it carries in suspension.

That same silt raises its bed above the surrounding plain, so it has flooded catastrophically many times - which is also why it is called China's Sorrow.

Answer: D

The three phrases name the same thing: the movement of heat from the tropics toward the poles by winds and ocean currents. Without it the equator would be far hotter and the poles far colder, so all are similar terms.

Answer: A

India's mineral wealth is concentrated in the north-eastern zone, the Chota Nagpur plateau and its surroundings across Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal - coal, iron ore, manganese, mica and bauxite all together.