World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The Seychelles is an archipelago of about 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, roughly 1,500 km east of mainland Africa.

Answer: D

Dalmianagar in the Rohtas district of Bihar is known for its cement works, established in the 1930s by the Dalmia group, after whom the town is named.

Limestone from the neighbouring Kaimur hills and coal from the Jharia field supplied the plant, which also made paper and sugar.

Answer: A

Where the zone of maximum stream velocity swings down towards the bed, the extra energy scours the channel and excavates a deep scoured pool.

Between the pools the velocity core lies higher in the flow, so material is deposited instead, building the shallow gravel bars called riffles. Pools and riffles therefore alternate along a channel.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Solar power

Solar power is renewable: the resource is replenished continuously on any human timescale, and using it does not diminish what is available tomorrow. Wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal and biomass belong to the same class. Coal and natural gas are fossil fuels, formed over hundreds of millions of years from buried organic matter, so the stock is fixed and burning it releases carbon dioxide that had been locked away. Uranium is the interesting case. Nuclear fission emits almost no carbon dioxide in operation, which makes it a low-carbon source, but the uranium ore itself is a finite mineral deposit, so it is not renewable. Low-carbon and renewable are two different tests, and nuclear passes one and fails the other. India’s renewable capacity has grown rapidly, with solar the fastest-expanding component, and a large share of it in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Karnataka.

Answer: D

All three statements are part of plate tectonic theory: new oceanic crust is created at mid-ocean ridges and the continents drift as the plates move; convection currents in the mantle drive that motion; and the oceanic crust is destroyed at subduction zones where one plate descends beneath another.

Creation, driving mechanism and destruction together make one coherent theory, so the combined choice is correct.

Answer: C

The Commonwealth of Independent States was founded on 8 December 1991 by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia (Belarus), whose leaders signed the Belovezha Accords declaring the USSR dissolved.

The other republics listed joined a fortnight later under the Alma-Ata Protocol, so they were members but not the original founders.

Answer: A

The Soviet Union comprised 15 union republics, all of which became independent states when it dissolved at the end of 1991.

Answer: A

The C horizon consists of weathered parent material not yet affected by translocation - broken-down rock that has not been reached by the leaching and accumulation which shape the A and B horizons above. Below it lies unweathered bedrock, the R horizon.

Answer: C

India's oldest oil refinery is at Digboi in Assam, commissioned in 1901 beside the oilfield discovered there in 1889.

It is one of the oldest working refineries anywhere in the world, though its capacity is small - about 0.65 million tonnes a year.

Answer: C

Correct answer: London

The Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich in southeast London, where the Royal Observatory stands, and it is the zero from which longitude is measured east and west. Unlike the equator, whose position is fixed by the Earth’s rotation, the choice of prime meridian is purely a convention. Several nations once used their own - Paris, Cadiz, Rio and others - and Greenwich was adopted internationally at the Washington conference of 1884, largely because most of the world’s shipping already used British charts. From it comes Greenwich Mean Time and, in modern practice, Coordinated Universal Time, against which every time zone is expressed as an offset. A small curiosity: modern satellite measurement places the true zero of longitude about 100 metres east of the brass line visitors stand on, because the reference frame now used differs slightly from the local vertical the Victorian astronomers worked with.