Indian Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: The northeastern states

Jhum is shifting cultivation, practised chiefly in the hill areas of the northeastern states - Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. A patch of forest is cleared and burnt, the ash fertilising the soil; it is cropped for two or three years until yields fall, then abandoned and left fallow while the cultivators move on. It is also called slash-and-burn agriculture, and the same practice has local names elsewhere - podu in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, bewar in Madhya Pradesh, kumari in the Western Ghats. It was sustainable while the fallow period ran to fifteen or twenty years and the population was small. Shortening cycles have made it a cause of deforestation, soil erosion and declining fertility, and governments have long tried to replace it with terraced or settled farming - with limited success, since it is bound up with land tenure and community practice as much as with agronomy.

Answer: C

Correct answer: The one-horned rhinoceros

Kaziranga, in Assam on the Brahmaputra floodplain, holds about two thirds of the world’s population of the one-horned rhinoceros. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and also a tiger reserve, with one of the highest tiger densities anywhere. Its tall elephant grass and seasonal flooding suit the rhinoceros exactly, and the annual Brahmaputra floods renew the grassland while forcing the animals to higher ground - a natural cycle that also exposes them to poaching and to road traffic. The other three species have their own strongholds, and the set is a standard examination pairing. The Asiatic lion survives only in the Gir Forest of Gujarat. The snow leopard lives in the high Himalaya of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, with Hemis National Park its best-known refuge. The Nilgiri tahr, a mountain goat, is confined to the Western Ghats, chiefly in Eravikulam National Park in Kerala.

Answer: A

The Sahyadri is another name for the Western Ghats.

They run about 1,600 km from the Tapti valley to Kanyakumari, parallel to the Arabian Sea coast, and force the south-west monsoon to rise - which is why their windward slopes are among the wettest places in India and the Deccan behind lies in rain shadow.

Answer: B

Garampani is in Assam.

It lies in Karbi Anglong district, near Diphu, and is one of the oldest sanctuaries in the state. It is known for its hot springs and waterfalls, and for the hoolock gibbon.

Answer: B

Brazil is the world's largest coffee producer.

It has led for over 150 years and grows roughly a third of the world's coffee, chiefly arabica in Minas Gerais and São Paulo. Vietnam is second, mostly robusta; India is sixth or seventh, with coffee from Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Answer: D

The instrument is a seismograph.

A heavy mass suspended so that it stays still while the frame moves with the ground traces the motion on a rotating drum. Comparing the arrival times of the faster P waves and the slower S waves at three or more stations locates the epicentre.

Answer: B

Venus is called the earth's sister planet.

It is almost the same size, mass and density as the earth and lies next to it in the solar system. The resemblance ends there: a runaway greenhouse effect under a carbon dioxide atmosphere ninety times as dense as ours keeps its surface at about 465 °C.

Answer: B

The forest area is decreasing.

Satellite assessment by the Forest Survey of India shows losses to encroachment, shifting cultivation, mining and development projects, particularly of dense forest, even where total green cover appears steady because plantations are counted in.

Answer: A

Kalpakkam was built entirely with Indian design and engineering.

The Madras Atomic Power Station in Tamil Nadu was the first wholly indigenous nuclear station, and its site also houses the country's Fast Breeder Test Reactor. Tarapur was built with American help and Rawatbhata with Canadian.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Madhya Pradesh

Madhya Pradesh has no coastline. Its name means central province, and it lies in the heart of the country, bordered by Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The other three are all coastal: Odisha on the Bay of Bengal, Karnataka on the Arabian Sea, and Andhra Pradesh on the Bay of Bengal. India has nine coastal states - Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal - so the remaining nineteen are landlocked. Among the larger ones are Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Punjab, Haryana and the whole of the northeast except the coastal fringe. Madhya Pradesh was the largest state in India until 2000, when Chhattisgarh was carved out of it and Rajasthan took first place. It has the largest forest cover of any state by area, and the Narmada and Tapi both rise within it.