World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The Commonwealth of Independent States was founded on 8 December 1991 by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia (Belarus), whose leaders signed the Belovezha Accords declaring the USSR dissolved.

The other republics listed joined a fortnight later under the Alma-Ata Protocol, so they were members but not the original founders.

Answer: A

The Soviet Union comprised 15 union republics, all of which became independent states when it dissolved at the end of 1991.

Answer: A

The C horizon consists of weathered parent material not yet affected by translocation - broken-down rock that has not been reached by the leaching and accumulation which shape the A and B horizons above. Below it lies unweathered bedrock, the R horizon.

Answer: C

India's oldest oil refinery is at Digboi in Assam, commissioned in 1901 beside the oilfield discovered there in 1889.

It is one of the oldest working refineries anywhere in the world, though its capacity is small - about 0.65 million tonnes a year.

Answer: C

Correct answer: London

The Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich in southeast London, where the Royal Observatory stands, and it is the zero from which longitude is measured east and west. Unlike the equator, whose position is fixed by the Earth’s rotation, the choice of prime meridian is purely a convention. Several nations once used their own - Paris, Cadiz, Rio and others - and Greenwich was adopted internationally at the Washington conference of 1884, largely because most of the world’s shipping already used British charts. From it comes Greenwich Mean Time and, in modern practice, Coordinated Universal Time, against which every time zone is expressed as an offset. A small curiosity: modern satellite measurement places the true zero of longitude about 100 metres east of the brass line visitors stand on, because the reference frame now used differs slightly from the local vertical the Victorian astronomers worked with.

Answer: C

Correct answer: The continuous transformation of rock between igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic forms

The rock cycle is the set of processes by which rock is continually converted from one of the three classes into another, with no beginning or end. Magma cools to form igneous rock. Weathering and erosion break it into sediment, which is transported, deposited, compacted and cemented into sedimentary rock. Burial under heat and pressure converts that into metamorphic rock. Further heating melts it back to magma, and the cycle begins again. The important point is that the route is not fixed. Any rock type can become any other: metamorphic rock can be eroded into sediment without ever melting, sedimentary rock can be melted directly, igneous rock can be metamorphosed. The cycle is driven by two energy sources - the Earth’s internal heat, which powers plate tectonics, melting and metamorphism, and solar energy, which powers weathering, erosion and transport. One consequence is that the rock beneath our feet has been recycled many times, which is why almost no crust survives from the Earth’s first few hundred million years.

Answer: B

The Pacific is the largest ocean, covering about 165 million km² - about a third of the Earth's surface, and more than the Atlantic and Indian oceans together.

It also holds the deepest point on the planet, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

Answer: A

An equinox is a date on which day and night are of equal length everywhere on Earth. The word comes from the Latin for 'equal night'.

It happens twice a year, about 20 March and 23 September, when the Sun is directly overhead at the equator.

Answer: C

Correct answer: The Pacific

El Niño is an unusual warming of surface waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, recurring irregularly every two to seven years. Normally the trade winds push warm water westward, allowing cold, nutrient-rich water to well up off South America. During an El Niño those winds slacken or reverse, the warm pool spreads back east, and the upwelling shuts down - which collapses the Peruvian anchovy fishery, the effect that gave the phenomenon its name among local fishermen, who noticed it appearing around Christmas. Its consequences are global: drought in Australia and Indonesia, heavy rain in Peru and Ecuador, and a weakened Indian monsoon, which is why the Indian Meteorological Department watches it closely. Its cold counterpart is La Niña, and the pair together with the associated pressure seesaw are known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.

Answer: D

Human geography covers all three fields. It studies society and culture as they are distributed in space, human behaviour and urban systems, and the economic and political organisation of territory.

Its unifying concern is the relationship between people and place, so all of the listed themes fall within it.