World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The Danube, Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural all flow in Europe.

The Volga, at about 3,530 km, is the longest river in Europe; the Danube, at 2,850 km, is second and passes through more countries than any other river in the world.

Answer: A

Correct answer: The southeastern coast, along the Bay of Bengal

The Coromandel Coast is the southeastern seaboard, running along the Bay of Bengal chiefly through Tamil Nadu and southern Andhra Pradesh. It is unusual climatically. Most of India receives its rain from the southwest monsoon between June and September, but the Coromandel lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats for that season and gets the bulk of its rainfall from the retreating or northeast monsoon in October to December, when winds blow from land to sea but pick up moisture crossing the Bay of Bengal. It is also exposed to cyclones forming in the Bay. The corresponding southwestern coast is the Malabar Coast in Kerala and Karnataka, which is very wet in the southwest monsoon. North of it lies the Konkan Coast of Maharashtra and Goa, and the northern coast of Gujarat is the Kathiawar or Saurashtra coast.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The Narmada

The Narmada is one of the few major peninsular rivers to flow west, running about 1,312 km from Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh to the Gulf of Khambhat on the Arabian Sea. The Tapi does the same. The reason is structural rather than topographic. Both flow through rift valleys - the Narmada between the Vindhya and Satpura ranges - troughs formed by faulting, so they follow a fracture in the crust rather than the general eastward tilt of the Deccan plateau. That is also why they form estuaries instead of deltas: they carry little silt and the rift channel discharges directly into a subsiding coast. The Godavari, Krishna and Mahanadi all rise on the Western Ghats and flow east across the plateau to the Bay of Bengal, building large deltas - the pattern set by the plateau tilting gently eastward. The Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada, and the long controversy over its displaced population, is among India’s best-known development disputes.

Answer: C

The intersecting lines of latitude and longitude drawn on maps and globes together form the geographic grid. Neither set alone can fix a position; it takes both coordinates.

Answer: C

The Earth's land area is about 148.94 million km².

The remaining 361.13 million km² of the planet's 510.94 million km² surface is ocean, so land accounts for only about 29 per cent of the whole.

Answer: B

During a magnetic storm the field generated by the ring current in the magnetosphere is directed opposite to the Earth's main field, which is why the horizontal component measured at the surface drops sharply.

That decrease is what the Dst index tracks; the recovery over the following days is the ring current decaying.

Answer: A

The fraction of incoming radiation a body reflects back to space is its albedo, and when the body is a planet it is the planetary albedo - about 0.30 to 0.36 for the Earth.

The term applies to any planet, so the general expression rather than the Earth-specific one is the correct name for the quantity.

Answer: B

Correct answer: The Nile

The Nile runs about 6,650 km from its headwaters in the East African highlands north to the Mediterranean, through eleven countries, and is generally reckoned the longest river in Africa and among the longest in the world. It has two main branches that meet at Khartoum: the White Nile, which rises in the Lake Victoria basin and provides the steady baseflow, and the Blue Nile, which rises at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and supplies most of the water and nearly all of the silt during the summer flood. That annual flood built the agricultural civilisation of ancient Egypt, and has been controlled since 1970 by the Aswan High Dam. The Congo is shorter but carries far more water - the second greatest discharge of any river after the Amazon - while the Niger is West Africa’s principal river and the Zambezi is the fourth longest, best known for the Victoria Falls.

Answer: D

Every description fits: the harmattan is a cool, very dry trade wind off the Sahara, it blows through the dry season from about December to February, and it carries great quantities of fine dust. So all of the above is correct.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Equator

The Equator is the line of zero latitude, equidistant from both poles. The Prime Meridian is the corresponding line of zero longitude and divides the Earth instead into eastern and western hemispheres.