World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The group is Thailand, Laos and Bangladesh.

Myanmar has five neighbours: Bangladesh and India to the west, China to the north-east, and Laos and Thailand to the east and south-east. Leaving out India and China leaves exactly Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand.

Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia do not border Myanmar, so the other two groups each contain at least one country that is not a neighbour.

Answer: C

The sea with no shore is the Sargasso Sea.

The Sargasso Sea lies in the North Atlantic and is the only sea defined not by coastlines but by ocean currents: the Gulf Stream to the west, the North Atlantic Current to the north, the Canary Current to the east and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current to the south. It is named after the floating Sargassum seaweed found in it.

The Weddell Sea borders Antarctica, the Arctic Sea is surrounded by land in the far north, and the North Pacific is not in the Atlantic at all.

Answer: D

The deepest point is the Mariana Trench.

The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean, is nearly 11,000 m below sea level, the deepest known point on Earth.

The Dead Sea shore, about 430 m below sea level, is the lowest point on land, which is the usual trap. The South Pole and the Sinai Peninsula are not low points at all.

Its depth is greater than the height of Mount Everest above sea level, about 8,849 m.

Answer: B

According to Ethnologue, the country with the most languages is Papua New Guinea.

Ethnologue, the reference catalogue of the world's languages, lists about 840 living languages in Papua New Guinea, more than in any other country, for a population of under ten million. Its mountainous terrain kept small communities apart for thousands of years.

Indonesia comes second with roughly 700, followed by Nigeria with over 500 and India with about 450, so none of them has the most.

Answer: A

The 'Third Pole' is the Himalaya-Hindukush mountain range and Tibetan Plateau (printed in the paper as Tibel Plateau).

The Hindu Kush-Himalaya region and the Tibetan Plateau hold the largest store of ice and snow outside the Arctic and Antarctic, which is why they are called the Third Pole. Their glaciers feed great Asian rivers including the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Mekong.

Antarctica is itself the South Pole region, Greenland lies in the Arctic, and the Central Siberian Plateau is a cold upland without comparable ice reserves.

Answer: B

The landlocked countries are Paraguay and Bolivia, so the answer is (i) and (ii) only.

They are the only two landlocked countries in South America. Bolivia lost its Pacific coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), and Paraguay reaches the sea only along the Paraguay and Parana rivers.

Peru has a long Pacific coast and Venezuela borders the Caribbean Sea, so every option including (iii) or (iv) is wrong.

Answer: B

Mount Agung is in Bali, Indonesia.

Agung is an active stratovolcano and the highest point of Bali. It erupted in November 2017 after decades of quiet, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and closing Bali's airport, and stayed active through 2018 and 2019.

Japan's best-known volcano on Honshu is Mount Fuji, the Democratic Republic of Congo has Nyiragongo, and Italy has Etna and Vesuvius. A caldera is a type of volcanic crater, not a place in Italy.

Answer: A

Ivory Coast is a country in Africa.

Ivory Coast, officially Cote d'Ivoire, lies in West Africa on the Gulf of Guinea, between Liberia and Ghana. It is the world's largest producer of cocoa. Its political capital is Yamoussoukro and its largest city and port is Abidjan. A former French colony, it became independent in 1960, and French is its official language.

The name comes from the ivory trade of the colonial era. It is not in Asia, South America or Australia.

Answer: B

Mount Etna is in Italy.

Mount Etna stands on the east coast of the island of Sicily in Italy. It is the tallest active volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world, erupting frequently.

Argentina, Mexico and the Philippines have famous volcanoes of their own, such as Popocatepetl in Mexico and Mayon and Pinatubo in the Philippines, but Etna is not among them.

Etna's eruptions have been recorded for about 2,700 years, and it was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013.

Answer: A

The 'Big Apple' is New York.

New York City has been nicknamed the Big Apple since the 1920s, when the phrase was popularised by a sports writer, and it was later adopted by the city's tourism campaigns in the 1970s.

Geneva, Montreal and Paris have other nicknames; Paris, for example, is called the City of Light.

The nickname was popularised in the 1920s by the sports writer John J. Fitz Gerald, who used it for New York's horse-racing circuit.