World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Pedogenesis is soil formation - the whole process by which weathered parent material develops into a soil with distinct horizons, under the influence of climate, organisms, relief, parent material and time.

Leaching, eluviation and illuviation are individual movements of material within the profile, and so are only components of pedogenesis.

Answer: D

The Suez Canal was built under the direction of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat and engineer, and opened in 1869.

Answer: B

A sidereal month is the time the Moon takes to complete one orbit of the Earth measured against a fixed star - about 27.3 days.

The synodic month, from one new moon to the next, is longer at about 29.5 days, because in the meantime the Earth has moved along its own orbit and the Moon must travel further to return to the same alignment with the Sun.

Answer: A

Sustainable development is defined as meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs - that is, intergenerational equity.

Answer: A

Correct answer: The tilt of the Earth’s axis

Seasons arise from the 23.5° tilt of the Earth’s axis. As the planet orbits, the tilt stays pointed in a fixed direction in space, so each hemisphere leans towards the Sun for part of the year and away from it for the rest. Leaning towards the Sun brings two effects together: the Sun stands higher in the sky, so its energy falls on a smaller area and heats it more intensely, and the days are longer, so that heating lasts longer. The common belief that distance causes the seasons is demonstrably wrong. The Earth is in fact closest to the Sun in early January, during the northern winter, and the variation is only about 3 per cent. The decisive evidence is that the two hemispheres have opposite seasons at the same moment - which distance alone could never produce. It is also why the tropics, where the Sun is always high, have wet and dry seasons rather than warm and cold ones.

Answer: A

The Rio Grande forms about 2,000 km of the border between the United States and Mexico, from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico knows it as the Río Bravo del Norte.

The Mississippi and Colorado lie wholly or largely within the United States, and the Amazon is in South America.

Answer: C

The line marked 0° latitude is the Equator, the great circle midway between the poles that divides the Earth into the northern and southern hemispheres.

The Tropic of Cancer lies at 23½° N and the Tropic of Capricorn at 23½° S, so neither is the zero line.

Answer: D

All the listed factors underlie biodiversity loss. Poverty and unsustainable development push people to clear habitat for immediate survival; macroeconomic policies such as subsidies make destructive land use profitable; and international trade moves the demand for timber, minerals and cash crops to where the biodiversity is.

These are the causes behind the immediate cause, habitat loss, so the combined choice is correct.

Answer: C

Correct answer: The Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia, is by a wide margin the largest coral reef system in the world: about 2,300 km long, made up of some 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands, and covering roughly 344,000 square kilometres. It is a barrier reef, separated from the shore by a lagoon, as distinct from a fringing reef attached to the coast or an atoll ringing a submerged volcano. Charles Darwin worked out the relationship between the three, proposing that a fringing reef becomes a barrier reef and then an atoll as the island beneath it subsides. It supports thousands of species of fish, molluscs and corals, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981. Repeated mass bleaching events since 2016, driven by marine heatwaves, have caused severe coral loss. The Belize Barrier Reef is the largest in the Atlantic and the second largest overall.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Charged particles from the Sun interacting with gases in the upper atmosphere

Auroras occur when charged particles carried by the solar wind are funnelled by the Earth’s magnetic field towards the poles and collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere, exciting them so that they emit light as they return to their normal state. The colour identifies the gas and the altitude: oxygen gives the common green at around 100 to 300 km and a rarer red higher up, while nitrogen gives blue and purple. The magnetic field is what confines the display to two rings around the geomagnetic poles - the aurora borealis in the north and the aurora australis in the south, which often mirror each other almost exactly. Activity follows the eleven-year solar cycle, and a strong geomagnetic storm can push the aurora to much lower latitudes. The same storms can disrupt satellites, radio communication and power grids.