World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: An erratic

A glacial erratic is a rock transported by ice and dropped far from its source, and it is recognised precisely because it does not match the bedrock it sits on. Erratics were among the first pieces of evidence for the ice ages: geologists in the nineteenth century could not explain granite boulders resting on limestone hundreds of kilometres from any granite, until glaciers were proposed as the carrier. Tracing an erratic back to its parent outcrop reveals the direction the ice flowed. The other three are also glacial landforms, but each is a shaped deposit rather than a single stray rock. A drumlin is a streamlined hill of till moulded beneath the ice; an esker is a long sinuous ridge of sand and gravel laid down by a stream flowing within or under the glacier; and a kame is a mound of debris dropped where meltwater ponded against the ice.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The uplift of land between two parallel faults

Block mountains, also called horsts, form where the crust is stretched and fractures, and a block between two parallel faults is either lifted or left standing while the ground on either side drops. The sunken counterpart is a graben, or rift valley. They are recognisable by their steep, straight fault-scarp sides and comparatively flat tops, quite unlike the crumpled strata of fold mountains. India’s Satpura and Vindhya ranges are of this type, with the Narmada flowing in the rift between them - which is why the Narmada runs west in a straight valley rather than meandering east like other peninsular rivers. Elsewhere the Sierra Nevada, the Vosges and Black Forest, and the East African Rift shoulders are examples. Fold mountains such as the Himalaya arise from compression at converging plates; volcanic mountains from erupted material; and residual mountains from the erosion of higher ground.

Answer: C

The Kuroshio is a warm current. It flows north-eastward along the east coast of Japan, carrying tropical water into the North Pacific, and is the Pacific counterpart of the Gulf Stream.

The Benguela current off south-west Africa, the Labrador current off eastern Canada and the South Pacific current all move cold water away from higher latitudes.

Answer: C

The divisions of geological time run eon → era → period → epoch → age, and in the rock record the corresponding smallest unit is the stage.

So of the options given, the stage is the finest subdivision and the eon the coarsest.

Answer: D

The Tertiary Period is divided into the Palaeocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene epochs. The Palaeocene is the lowermost and therefore the oldest of these, beginning about 66 million years ago immediately after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Pliocene is the youngest Tertiary epoch, the Holocene lies in the Quaternary, and the Palaeozoic is an era far older than the whole Tertiary.

Answer: C

The Command Area Development programme has both aims. It works to close the gap between irrigation potential created and potential actually used by building field channels, land levelling and warabandi rotation, and through those same works to raise agricultural productivity in the command area.

Because both statements describe the programme, the combined choice is correct.

Answer: A

Cuba is known as the sugar bowl of the world. Its climate and soils suit sugar cane, and for most of the twentieth century sugar dominated its economy and exports.

Answer: B

The middle-latitude or temperate zone lies between about 23½° and 66½° in both hemispheres - that is, between each tropic and the corresponding polar circle.

Poleward of 66½° lie the high latitudes, and equatorward of 23½° the low latitudes.

Answer: A

The Friendship Bridge over the Oxus (Amu Darya) connects Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, linking Termez to Hairatan.

Opened in 1982, it was the route by which Soviet forces entered and later withdrew from Afghanistan, and it remains the main overland freight crossing between the two countries.

Answer: A

A reaction between a compound and oxygen is oxidation. In weathering it is most visible when iron-bearing minerals take up oxygen to form iron oxides, staining rock the reddish-brown of rust.

Hydrolysis is reaction with water, carbonation is reaction with carbonic acid, and solution is simple dissolving - none of them involves oxygen.