World Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

When eroded material is dissolved and carried along as individual ions in the water, the transport process is called solution. Limestone regions lose most of their material this way, as calcium and bicarbonate ions.

Suspension carries fine particles held up in the flow, saltation bounces sand grains along, and traction rolls or drags the coarsest material over the bed.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Full moon

A lunar eclipse can occur only at full moon, because it requires the Earth to lie between the Sun and the Moon so that its shadow can fall on the lunar surface - and that is precisely the geometry that makes the Moon appear full. By the same reasoning a solar eclipse can occur only at new moon, when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth. Eclipses do not happen every month because the Moon’s orbit is tilted about 5° to the plane of the Earth’s orbit, so at most full moons it passes above or below the shadow. Eclipses come only when a full or new moon coincides with the Moon crossing that plane, at points called nodes. A lunar eclipse is visible from the entire night side of the Earth at once and lasts for hours, which is why they are seen far more often from any one place than solar eclipses. The eclipsed Moon usually turns a deep red, because sunlight refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere reaches it after the blue light has been scattered away.

Answer: A

The total surface area of the Earth is about 510.94 million km².

Of that, about 361 million km² is ocean and about 149 million km² is land - a split of roughly 71 to 29 per cent.

Answer: B

The Mont Blanc tunnel, opened in 1965 and about 11.6 km long, runs under the Mont Blanc massif to connect Chamonix in France with Courmayeur in Italy.

The St. Gotthard tunnel is in Switzerland, the Mersey tunnel in England, and the Orange–Fish tunnel in South Africa.

Answer: A

Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales, at 2,228 m, is the highest point on the Australian mainland. Mount Townsend, only 19 m lower, is second.

Answer: A

The tallest sand dunes are in the Sahara, where the star dunes of the Erg Chebbi and the Issaouane Erg rise more than 150 m. The Sahara's size and steady wind regimes allow dunes to build to such heights.

Answer: C

Corbett National Park lies in the Nainital district of Uttarakhand. Established in 1936 as Hailey National Park, it is the oldest national park in India, and was renamed after the hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett in 1957.

It was where Project Tiger was launched in 1973.

Answer: C

Both groups are major sources of free gas in India. The South Bassein and Tapti fields in the western offshore are the largest, and the onshore fields of Tripura and the Krishna–Godavari basin in Andhra Pradesh add substantially to output.

Free gas is gas produced from a gas reservoir in its own right, as distinct from associated gas dissolved in crude oil.

Answer: A

Correct answer: The Labrador Current

The Labrador Current is cold, flowing south from the Arctic along the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland and carrying icebergs with it - it was one of these that sank the Titanic in 1912. The general pattern is worth holding in mind: currents flowing away from the equator carry warm water, and those flowing away from the poles carry cold water. So the Gulf Stream and the Kuroshio, both moving poleward on the western sides of their oceans, are warm; the Labrador, Canary, Benguela and Peru currents, moving equatorward, are cold. Where a warm and a cold current meet, the mixing brings nutrients up and produces exceptional fisheries - the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where the Labrador meets the Gulf Stream, was the classic example. Such meetings also generate persistent fog. Cold currents alongside coasts also produce deserts, since air over cold water carries little moisture; the Atacama and Namib both owe their aridity to this.

Answer: B

Correct answer: An aquifer

An aquifer is a body of rock or sediment porous enough to hold water and permeable enough to let it flow - sandstone, limestone and unconsolidated gravel are typical. Groundwater held this way supplies a large share of the world’s drinking water and most of its irrigation. The two properties are distinct and both are needed: clay is highly porous but its pores are so fine that water will not move through it, which makes clay an aquiclude, a barrier rather than a store. A watershed is the divide between two drainage basins, a surface feature rather than a subsurface one. An artesian well is not a formation at all but a well drilled into a confined aquifer where the pressure is sufficient to drive water to the surface without pumping.