World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The equatorial climate - hot and wet all year - supports dense evergreen rainforest, and on cleared land the plantation crops suited to it, chiefly rubber, together with oil palm, cocoa and groundnut.

Wheat, barley, oats and potatoes are temperate crops, and coniferous forest belongs to the cold northern latitudes.

Answer: C

Hot and cold deserts together cover roughly one third of the earth's land surface. The cold deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic account for a large part of that total, which is why the figure is higher than most people expect.

Answer: D

Cinnabar, pyrite and galena are all sulphides - of mercury, iron and lead respectively. The sulphide group contains most of the world's important metallic ores.

Answer: A

Mercury is the smallest planet, with a diameter of about 4,880 km - only a little larger than the Moon and smaller than Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

It became the smallest in 2006, when Pluto, previously smaller still, was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Plate tectonics

Plate tectonics holds that the lithosphere - the crust together with the rigid uppermost mantle - is broken into about fifteen major plates that move a few centimetres a year over the ductile asthenosphere beneath. Almost all earthquakes, volcanoes and mountain ranges occur at their boundaries, of which there are three kinds: divergent, where plates separate and new crust forms, as at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; convergent, where one plate is driven beneath another, producing trenches and volcanic arcs; and transform, where plates slide past each other, as along the San Andreas Fault. The theory grew out of Alfred Wegener’s continental drift, which he proposed in 1912 but could not explain a mechanism for. It was accepted only in the 1960s, once seafloor spreading and the magnetic striping of the ocean floor supplied one. Isostasy is the buoyant balance of crust on mantle; uniformitarianism is the principle that present processes explain past ones; and orogeny is mountain building, one consequence of tectonics rather than the theory itself.

Answer: C

Sakhalin, the long island north of Japan, is administered by Russia but its ownership has been contested with Japan for two centuries.

Japan held the southern half from 1905 to 1945; the Soviet Union took the whole island at the end of the Second World War, and no peace treaty has ever settled the matter.

Answer: A

The western coastal plain is divided in two: the northern part, from Daman down to Goa, is the Konkan plain, and the southern part, along Karnataka and Kerala, is the Malabar coast.

The Coromandel coast lies on the opposite, eastern side of the peninsula.

Answer: B

The Chandrasekhar limit, about 1.4 solar masses, is the greatest mass a white dwarf can have. Above it the pressure of degenerate electrons can no longer hold the star up, and it collapses to a neutron star or a black hole.

It was derived by S. Chandrasekhar in 1930 and won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.

Answer: B

Of the options offered, the tide of minimum rise is the low tide - the point in the cycle at which the water reaches its lowest level.

The ebb tide is not a level but the falling movement between high water and low water, and a spring tide is the tide of greatest range.

Answer: B

The observable universe is estimated to contain about 100 billion galaxies, each holding on average a hundred billion stars or so.

Deep-field images from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, which count galaxies in a tiny patch of sky and scale up, are the basis of the estimate.