Indian Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The Indo-Gangetic plain is India's most fertile region.

It is built of alluvium brought down by the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra, in places several kilometres deep and renewed by each flood. Level land, deep soil, a high water table and a long growing season together support the densest agricultural population in the world.

Answer: A

Cotton grows best on black soil.

Regur, the black cotton soil of the Deccan lava country, is clayey and holds moisture well, so the crop survives long dry spells. It is also rich in lime, magnesia and potash, though poor in nitrogen and phosphorus.

Answer: C

All four statements are true.

The southern block is Archaean granite and gneiss; the Deccan lava plateau is a tableland of horizontal basalt sheets laid down at the end of the Cretaceous; the Malwa plateau with its Vindhyan scarps forms the northern flank; and the Narmada and Tapti troughs are rift valleys between the Vindhyan and Satpura ranges.

Answer: A

The south-west monsoon contributes about 86 per cent of India's rainfall.

It runs from June to September, so the country receives the great bulk of its water in four months, and almost nothing for the rest of the year over most of its area. That concentration is why reservoirs and groundwater matter so much.

Answer: C

It is Koradi, near Nagpur.

Koradi in Maharashtra is one of the country's large coal-fired stations. Narora and Kalpakkam are nuclear rather than thermal plants, so they do not belong in the comparison at all.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh

The Green Revolution succeeded most strikingly in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, which became the country’s grain surplus region and turned India from an importer of food into a self-sufficient producer. It rested on a package rather than a single change: high-yielding dwarf varieties of wheat and rice, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, assured irrigation, mechanisation and price support through procurement. The dwarf wheat came from Norman Borlaug’s work in Mexico, and M. S. Swaminathan led its adaptation in India from the mid-1960s. The regional concentration was itself a consequence of the package. Assured canal and tubewell irrigation was essential, and only those states had it at the necessary scale, which is why the benefits were uneven and regional disparities widened. Its costs are now well documented: falling water tables, soil degradation, loss of crop diversity, and the wheat-rice cycle displacing pulses and millets. The White Revolution in milk and the Blue Revolution in fisheries followed the same model.

Answer: C

Köppen proposed five major types of climate.

They are A tropical, B dry, C warm temperate, D cold snow-forest and E polar, with a sixth, H, for highland added later. The scheme of 1918 classifies climate by monthly temperature and rainfall, using the boundaries of natural vegetation as its guide, and remains the most widely used system.

Answer: D

All of these are listed.

Kaziranga, Keoladeo and the Sundarbans are all inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage sites, along with Nanda Devi and the Valley of Flowers, and the Western Ghats. Kaziranga protects the great one-horned rhinoceros, Keoladeo is a wetland for migratory birds, and the Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world.

Answer: B

This is called transhumance.

Herders move flocks to high pasture in summer and back to the valleys in winter, following the grass. In India the Gujjars, Bakarwals and Gaddis of the western Himalayas practise it, as do the Bhotias of Uttarakhand.

Answer: C

The Singareni coalfields lie in the Godavari valley.

They stretch along the Pranhita-Godavari basin in Telangana and are the only significant coal deposit in peninsular India south of the Damodar valley. Singareni Collieries is one of India's oldest coal companies, dating from 1889.