World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The homolographic (equal-area) projection preserves area, so regions are shown in their true relative size. It does so at the cost of shape, which becomes increasingly distorted toward the edges.

Answer: D

India is Asia's largest producer of mica, the deposits of Jharkhand, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh yielding sheet mica of exceptional quality for electrical insulation.

Answer: B

The Rhine rises in the Swiss Alps, flows about 1,230 km through Germany and the Netherlands, and empties into the North Sea through a delta near Rotterdam.

It is the busiest waterway in Europe, and the port at its mouth handles more cargo than any other in the continent.

Answer: A

The rising coastlines of eastern and northern Canada and Scandinavia are explained by isostasy. The crust there was pressed down by the weight of the Pleistocene ice sheets, and since the ice melted it has been slowly rebounding as the mantle flows back beneath it.

The land is rising faster than the sea, so relative sea level continues to fall - by up to a centimetre a year in the Gulf of Bothnia.

Answer: B

Correct answer: The increasing share of a population living in towns and cities

Urbanisation is the rising proportion of a population living in urban areas. The proportion is the point: a country whose cities and villages grow at the same rate is not urbanising, however fast its cities expand. It is driven by migration from the countryside, by natural increase within cities, and by the reclassification of settlements as they cross the threshold of urban status. The pull is usually employment, education and services; the push is often agricultural distress. The world passed the halfway mark around 2007, and India is around 35 per cent urban and rising. Rapid urbanisation strains housing, water and transport, which is why the growth of informal settlements typically outpaces planning. The movement of people between countries is migration, a distinct process.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Venezuela

Angel Falls plunges 979 metres from the rim of Auyán-tepui in the Canaima National Park of southeastern Venezuela, making it by a wide margin the highest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth. The drop is so great that in the dry season much of the water disperses into mist before reaching the bottom. It falls from a tepui, one of the flat-topped sandstone table mountains of the Guiana Highlands, whose isolated summits carry species found nowhere else. It is named after Jimmie Angel, the American aviator who landed on the plateau in 1937; in Venezuela it is officially Kerepakupai Merú. Height is only one measure of a waterfall. By volume the largest are quite different: the Victoria Falls on the Zambia–Zimbabwe border and the Iguaçu Falls between Brazil and Argentina are both far wider and carry vastly more water.

Answer: B

Minerals whose chemistry is based on hydrocarbons form the organic group - amber and the various mineral waxes among them. Silicates, oxides and hydrides are all inorganic classes.

Answer: A

The Indo-Gangetic plain is India's most fertile region. It is built of deep alluvium brought down by the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra and renewed by their floods, and it is almost perfectly level and easily irrigated.

It occupies only about a quarter of India's area but supports nearly half its people.

Answer: A

The biosphere is a thin shell, reaching about 8 to 10 km above the surface and a comparable distance into the ocean deeps.

Above that the air is too thin and cold, and the ultraviolet radiation too intense, for life to persist. Almost all living things in fact occupy a far narrower band close to the surface.

Answer: D

There are seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia.

They are listed here in descending order of area, from Asia's 44.6 million km² down to Australia's 7.7 million.