World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Geomorphology is the study of landforms: their characteristics, their origin and the processes that develop and change them.

Geology is the wider study of the Earth's materials and history, geography of the Earth's surface and human use of it, and ecology of the relations between organisms and their surroundings.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The area of land drained by a river and its tributaries

A watershed, or drainage basin, is the whole area of land from which water drains into a single river system. Its outer boundary is the divide, a ridge line beyond which precipitation flows to a different system. Basins nest inside one another: every tributary has its own, contained within the larger basin of the river it joins. The Ganga basin covers about a quarter of India’s land area on this reckoning. The concept matters for management because a river integrates everything that happens on its catchment - deforestation, fertiliser use, urban runoff - which is why water planning is now organised around basins rather than administrative borders, and why disputes over rivers such as the Kaveri involve every state in the basin. The mouth of a river, a dam and a flood are all features found within a basin, not definitions of one.

Answer: B

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. It has home rule over most domestic matters, while Denmark retains foreign affairs and defence.

Answer: A

The Kerala coastal plain shows India's most typical dispersed rural settlement. Homesteads stand singly in their own gardens of coconut and areca along the backwaters instead of clustering into compact villages, because water is available almost everywhere and each holding can support a house.

The Ganga plain, eastern Rajasthan and the Telangana plateau all have nucleated villages, usually grouped around a limited number of wells or tanks.

Answer: B

The shortest day in the northern hemisphere is about 22 December, the winter solstice, when the Sun is overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn and the northern hemisphere is tilted furthest from it.

The same date is the longest day in the southern hemisphere.

Answer: A

A caldera forms in the most violent eruptions of all: gas-rich, viscous magma is blown out so rapidly that the emptied chamber roof collapses, leaving a basin many kilometres wide. Krakatoa and Santorini are examples.

Shield volcanoes and basalt plateaus erupt fluid lava quietly, and cinder cones produce only small, local explosive activity.

Answer: A

Yokohama and Kobe are major ports of Japan and long-standing centres of its shipbuilding industry. Both grew as treaty ports opened to foreign trade in the nineteenth century.

Answer: B

Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole - its origin, structure, evolution and eventual fate.

Its close relation, cosmography, is concerned only with describing and mapping the universe's features rather than explaining them.

Answer: A

The countries with the lowest incomes and worst food security - those of sub-Saharan Africa - are described as the world's pole of hunger.

Drought, poor soils, weak infrastructure and conflict combine there to give the highest rates of undernourishment anywhere, so it is the extreme point on any map of hunger.

Answer: B

Sri Lanka is the classic major producer of graphite, and the only country producing vein or lump graphite of very high purity - over 90 per cent carbon - from its mines at Bogala and Kahatagaha.

Other countries mine larger tonnages of flake and amorphous graphite, but Sri Lankan vein graphite remains the benchmark for quality.