World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Mount Everest, at 8,849 m, is the highest point on Earth, standing on the Nepal–Tibet border in the Greater Himalaya.

K2 in the Karakoram is second at 8,611 m, Kilimanjaro is Africa's highest at 5,895 m, and the Ellsworth Mountains hold Antarctica's highest peak.

Answer: C

Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawaii, is the world's largest active volcano. It rises 4,169 m above the sea and more than 9,000 m from its base on the ocean floor, and it makes up about half the island's area.

Its lava is very fluid, so it erupts as broad flows rather than explosively.

Answer: D

All three factors prevent forest growth in the polar regions. The growing season is only a few weeks long; the ground is frozen or under snow and ice for most of the year, so roots cannot penetrate or take up water; and precipitation is very low, since cold air holds almost no moisture.

Together they limit the vegetation to tundra mosses, lichens and dwarf shrubs.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Has exceptional species richness and is under serious threat

A biodiversity hotspot must satisfy two conditions: it holds at least 1,500 endemic vascular plant species - species found nowhere else - and it has lost at least 70 per cent of its original habitat. The second criterion is what makes the concept useful. Richness alone would simply identify the tropics; adding threat identifies where conservation spending will save the most species per rupee. The idea was introduced by Norman Myers in 1988, and about 36 hotspots are now recognised, together holding a large share of the world’s endemic species on a small fraction of its land. Four lie wholly or partly in India: the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, the Eastern Himalaya as part of the Himalaya hotspot, Indo-Burma covering the northeast, and Sundaland including the Nicobar Islands. The word hotspot is used quite differently in geology, where it means a plume of rising mantle such as the one beneath Hawaii.

Answer: B

Of those listed, the Mediterranean is the largest sea, covering about 2.5 million km².

The Caribbean is about 2.75 million km² by some reckonings but is usually counted as a sea of the Atlantic proper; the Bering Sea covers about 2 million km² and the East China Sea only 1.25 million.

Answer: D

The Great Dividing Range runs for some 3,500 km down the eastern side of Australia, from Cape York to Victoria.

It separates the rivers flowing east to the Pacific from those draining west into the interior, and its highest point is Mount Kosciuszko at 2,228 m.

Answer: A

Correct answer: 15°

The Earth turns through 360° in 24 hours, so in one hour it turns \[ \frac{360}{24} = 15 \text{ degrees}. \] That single figure underlies the whole system of time zones: each standard zone is nominally 15° of longitude wide, and local time changes by one hour for every 15° travelled east or west. Four minutes correspond to one degree. It also explains India’s single time zone. Indian Standard Time is fixed to the 82.5°E meridian near Mirzapur, giving an offset of \( 82.5 / 15 = 5.5 \) hours ahead of Greenwich - the half hour comes from the meridian falling midway between two whole multiples of 15. Before the railways forced standardisation in the nineteenth century, each town simply kept its own solar time.

Answer: D

Geomorphology is the study of landforms: their characteristics, their origin and the processes that develop and change them.

Geology is the wider study of the Earth's materials and history, geography of the Earth's surface and human use of it, and ecology of the relations between organisms and their surroundings.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The area of land drained by a river and its tributaries

A watershed, or drainage basin, is the whole area of land from which water drains into a single river system. Its outer boundary is the divide, a ridge line beyond which precipitation flows to a different system. Basins nest inside one another: every tributary has its own, contained within the larger basin of the river it joins. The Ganga basin covers about a quarter of India’s land area on this reckoning. The concept matters for management because a river integrates everything that happens on its catchment - deforestation, fertiliser use, urban runoff - which is why water planning is now organised around basins rather than administrative borders, and why disputes over rivers such as the Kaveri involve every state in the basin. The mouth of a river, a dam and a flood are all features found within a basin, not definitions of one.

Answer: B

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. It has home rule over most domestic matters, while Denmark retains foreign affairs and defence.