World Geography Questions and Answers

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.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Earth

Earth is the largest and most massive of the four terrestrial planets, slightly ahead of Venus, with Mars about half its diameter and Mercury smaller still. The inner planets share a common structure - an iron core, a silicate mantle and a solid crust - and are dense and small compared with the gas giants beyond the asteroid belt. That division arose in the early solar system, when the heat of the young Sun drove volatile material outward, leaving only rock and metal to condense close in. Earth is distinguished among them by liquid water at the surface, plate tectonics, an oxygen-rich atmosphere and a strong magnetic field generated by its liquid outer core - which shields the atmosphere from being stripped by the solar wind, a protection Mars lost. It is also the densest planet in the solar system.

Answer: C

Starlight is dimmed and reddened by both the earth's atmosphere and interstellar dust. The atmosphere scatters and absorbs light on its way to the ground, and dust between the stars does the same over far greater distances - which is why telescopes are placed on mountains and in orbit.

Answer: C

The magnetosphere is most disturbed during the main phase of a magnetic storm, when the ring current intensifies and the horizontal field component drops sharply. The initial and recovery phases bracket it.