World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: The Indian Ocean

The Maldives lie in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka and India, and consist of about 1,200 coral islands grouped into 26 atolls. They are the lowest-lying country in the world, with an average elevation around 1.5 metres and a highest point of only about 2.4 metres, which makes them among the most exposed of all nations to sea level rise - a point their governments have pressed at every climate negotiation. The islands are atolls in Darwin’s sense: coral reefs that grew around volcanic islands which have since subsided, leaving a ring of reef enclosing a lagoon. The Maldives is a close maritime neighbour of India, with no land border, and the two cooperate closely on maritime security. Other Indian Ocean island states include Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the Seychelles and Madagascar.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Mars and Jupiter

The main asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, roughly 2 to 3.3 astronomical units from the Sun. It contains millions of rocky bodies, from Ceres at about 940 km across - now classified as a dwarf planet - down to boulders. Despite the impression given by films, it is extremely empty: the average separation between objects is of the order of a million kilometres, and spacecraft have crossed it without difficulty. Its total mass is only about 4 per cent of the Moon’s. It is not the debris of a shattered planet, as was once thought, but material that never accreted into one. Jupiter’s gravity stirred the region so vigorously that collisions there were destructive rather than constructive. It marks the boundary between the rocky inner planets and the gas giants beyond. The Kuiper Belt is a second, far larger reservoir beyond Neptune, where Pluto resides.

Answer: C

When the Sun, Moon and Earth lie in a straight line - at new moon and full moon - the solar and lunar pulls act together and produce the tide of greatest range, the spring tide.

The name has nothing to do with the season; it comes from the sense of water 'springing up'. Spring tides occur twice a month.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Inner core

The inner core is a ball of iron and nickel about 1,220 km in radius at the centre of the Earth. Although its temperature approaches that of the surface of the Sun, it is solid, because the pressure there is so immense that it holds the metal in a solid state. That it is solid was deduced, not observed: Inge Lehmann showed in 1936 that S waves, which cannot travel through liquid, are absent beyond a certain distance while a reflected P wave reappears - evidence of a solid body inside a liquid shell. Outside it lies the liquid outer core, whose churning convection generates the Earth’s magnetic field. Beyond that is the mantle, much the largest layer by volume, and outermost the thin crust. Nobody has sampled any of this directly; the deepest borehole ever drilled reached about 12 km, not even through the crust.

Answer: A

Correct answer: China

China is the largest producer of rice, with India close behind; between them they account for roughly half of world output. The two differ sharply in yield and in trade. China produces more from a smaller area because its yields are considerably higher, helped by more assured irrigation and greater fertiliser use. India has the largest area under rice of any country and, despite lower yields, is the world’s largest exporter, since China consumes almost all of what it grows. Rice needs high temperature, heavy rainfall or reliable irrigation, and level land that can be flooded, which is why it dominates the deltas and river plains of monsoon Asia - West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh in India. Thailand and Vietnam are the other major exporters. Indonesia is the third largest producer but imports as well, because its population is so large.

Answer: C

The Sun's diameter is about 1,392,000 km, that is roughly 14 lakh kilometres - some 109 times the Earth's diameter of 12,756 km.

Put another way, about 1.3 million Earths would fit inside it, and it holds 99.8 per cent of all the mass in the solar system.

Answer: A

Metasomatic metamorphism is the change in a rock's chemistry brought about when hot gases and fluids permeate the bedrock and exchange ions with the existing minerals, replacing some elements with others.

The other kinds are distinguished by their agent rather than by chemical exchange: thermal and contact metamorphism act mainly through heat from an intrusion, and dynamic metamorphism through directed pressure along fault zones.

Answer: A

The products of weathering are the loose material that erosion picks up and carries away, and the sequence ends when that material is laid down again in deposition.

The full chain is weathering → erosion → transport → deposition: rock is first broken down in place, then removed, moved and finally dropped.

Answer: A

The watershed between India and Myanmar is formed by the Naga Hills, part of the Purvanchal ranges along India's eastern frontier. Their highest point, Saramati, reaches 3,826 m.

The Khasi, Jaintia and Garo hills lie further west, in Meghalaya, well within India.

Answer: C

The largest dune fields on earth lie in both the Middle East and North Africa - the Rub' al Khali of Arabia and the great ergs of the Sahara.