World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The intersecting lines of latitude and longitude drawn on maps and globes together form the geographic grid. Neither set alone can fix a position; it takes both coordinates.

Answer: C

The Earth's land area is about 148.94 million km².

The remaining 361.13 million km² of the planet's 510.94 million km² surface is ocean, so land accounts for only about 29 per cent of the whole.

Answer: B

During a magnetic storm the field generated by the ring current in the magnetosphere is directed opposite to the Earth's main field, which is why the horizontal component measured at the surface drops sharply.

That decrease is what the Dst index tracks; the recovery over the following days is the ring current decaying.

Answer: A

The fraction of incoming radiation a body reflects back to space is its albedo, and when the body is a planet it is the planetary albedo - about 0.30 to 0.36 for the Earth.

The term applies to any planet, so the general expression rather than the Earth-specific one is the correct name for the quantity.

Answer: B

Correct answer: The Nile

The Nile runs about 6,650 km from its headwaters in the East African highlands north to the Mediterranean, through eleven countries, and is generally reckoned the longest river in Africa and among the longest in the world. It has two main branches that meet at Khartoum: the White Nile, which rises in the Lake Victoria basin and provides the steady baseflow, and the Blue Nile, which rises at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and supplies most of the water and nearly all of the silt during the summer flood. That annual flood built the agricultural civilisation of ancient Egypt, and has been controlled since 1970 by the Aswan High Dam. The Congo is shorter but carries far more water - the second greatest discharge of any river after the Amazon - while the Niger is West Africa’s principal river and the Zambezi is the fourth longest, best known for the Victoria Falls.

Answer: D

Every description fits: the harmattan is a cool, very dry trade wind off the Sahara, it blows through the dry season from about December to February, and it carries great quantities of fine dust. So all of the above is correct.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Equator

The Equator is the line of zero latitude, equidistant from both poles. The Prime Meridian is the corresponding line of zero longitude and divides the Earth instead into eastern and western hemispheres.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The alignment of mineral crystals under directed pressure

Foliation arises when metamorphism occurs under pressure that is greater in one direction than another. Platy minerals such as mica recrystallise with their flat faces perpendicular to the maximum stress, so the rock develops parallel layers and splits easily along them. It produces a recognisable sequence of increasing metamorphic grade: shale becomes slate, then phyllite, then schist, then gneiss, the crystals growing coarser and the banding more pronounced at each step. Slate’s ability to split into thin sheets - its cleavage - is what makes it a roofing material. Rocks metamorphosed under uniform pressure, or made of minerals with no platy habit, come out non-foliated instead: limestone becomes marble and sandstone becomes quartzite, both massive rather than banded. The layers of a sedimentary rock look similar but are bedding, formed by deposition, and they record the surface on which the sediment settled rather than the direction of later stress.

Answer: D

Both motions are involved. The Earth's rotation on its axis creates day and night at all, and its revolution around the Sun, while the axis stays tilted in the same direction, makes each hemisphere lean towards or away from the Sun through the year, so the day lengthens and shortens.

Note that the axial tilt is 23½°, not the 60½° the third option claims.

Answer: A

Pangaea, the single supercontinent of the late Palaeozoic, began to break apart in the Jurassic into two landmasses: Laurasia in the north - North America, Europe and most of Asia - and Gondwanaland in the south, comprising South America, Africa, Arabia, India, Australia and Antarctica.

The two were separated by the Tethys Sea, whose closure later raised the Alps and the Himalaya.