World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The Cenozoic (Cainozoic) is the most recent era of the geological time scale, beginning about 66 million years ago and continuing to the present. It is the era of mammals and flowering plants.

The Mesozoic precedes it, the Triassic is a period within the Mesozoic, and the Palaeocene is an epoch within the Cenozoic - none of them is an era at the top of the column.

Answer: B

The superior planets are those whose orbits lie outside the Earth's: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and, on the older reckoning that still counted it as a planet, Pluto.

Mercury and Venus orbit inside the Earth's path and are therefore the inferior planets, which is why they are never seen far from the Sun in the sky.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Pedology

Pedology is the study of soils - how they form, what they are made of, how they are classified and how they are distributed. The name comes from the Greek pedon, ground. It treats soil as a natural body in its own right, the product of five factors: parent material, climate, organisms, relief and time. A vertical section through a soil shows distinct horizons, and reading them reveals the history of its formation. It is usually distinguished from edaphology, which studies soil as a medium for plant growth and so belongs more to agriculture. The distractors name adjacent earth sciences: geomorphology is the study of landforms, hydrology of water, and seismology of earthquakes.

Answer: B

Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. It meets two of the three tests for a planet - it orbits the Sun and is round under its own gravity - but it has not cleared its orbital neighbourhood, sharing the Kuiper Belt with many similar bodies.

Mercury, Mars and Uranus remain full planets.

Answer: D

All three are properties of cosmic ray particles. They are mostly protons and heavier nuclei, so they carry an electric charge; each has a rest mass; and they arrive with enormous energy, typically 10&sup8; to 10²0; electron volts.

Since every listed property applies, the combined choice is correct.

Answer: B

There are seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia. Some traditions merge Europe and Asia into Eurasia, or the two Americas into one, which is where the counts of six and five come from.

Answer: B

The Caspian Sea is an inland sea, entirely landlocked and with no connection to the world ocean. The Caribbean, Red and Yellow Seas all open onto oceans.

Answer: B

The reaction of minerals with carbonate and bicarbonate ions is carbonation. Rainwater dissolves carbon dioxide to form weak carbonic acid, which attacks calcium carbonate and converts it into soluble calcium bicarbonate:

\[ \mathrm{CaCO_3 + H_2O + CO_2 \rightarrow Ca(HCO_3)_2} \]

This is the process that dissolves limestone and produces karst caves and sinkholes.

Answer: C

Dogger Bank, Rockall Bank and the other banks named lie in the north-east Atlantic, around the British Isles and the North Sea.

A bank is a shallow rise on the continental shelf. Sunlight reaches the bottom there and nutrients are stirred up, so plankton is abundant and these banks have been among Europe's richest fishing grounds for centuries.

Answer: A

Correct answer: A seismograph

A seismograph records ground motion. The classic design suspends a heavy mass that tends to stay still by inertia while the frame and the ground move beneath it, and the relative motion is traced onto a rotating drum or, now, recorded electronically. The trace itself is a seismogram. Readings from at least three separated stations locate an earthquake, by comparing the arrival times of the fast P waves and the slower S waves; the gap between them gives the distance to the source, and three distances fix the point. Note that magnitude is not an instrument but a scale computed from the record: the Richter scale, and now the more widely used moment magnitude scale, both logarithmic, so a step of one unit is roughly a thirtyfold increase in energy released. A barometer measures air pressure and a hygrometer humidity; neither has anything to do with earthquakes.