Environmental Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The level of erosion is highest in the Tropical Asia climate region.

The passage says Tropical Asia, Africa and South America have the highest levels of erosion. Of the four options only Tropical Asia climate matches. Monsoon Asia, Tropical Savannah and Tropical Steppe are not named in the passage.

Answer: D

Deforestation adversely affects the hydrology.

The passage says a major consequence of deforestation is adverse alteration in the hydrology and related soil nutrient losses. Hydrology is the study of water, which fits the changes in the water available and its quality that the passage lists. Geomorphology, pedology (soil science) and cryology (ice and snow) are not what it names.

Answer: B

Desertification often occurs in hot desert areas.

The passage says the phenomenon is often linked to arid, semi-arid and sub-humid ecosystems, which are dry regions such as hot deserts and their margins, though the impact can be dramatic even in the humid tropics. Polar areas, the cold season and Arunachal Pradesh (a humid hill State) are not linked to it in the passage.

Answer: A

Accelerated erosion chiefly occurs in mountains.

The passage gives "accelerated erosion as in the mountain regions of the country" as one of the ways in which impoverishment of land shows itself. The plains are named for site quality decline and monoculture, and arid and semi-arid areas for salinization, not for accelerated erosion.

Answer: B

They are a Structural approach to flood control.

Flood management is divided into structural measures, which physically change the river or hold back water (dams, reservoirs, levees and embankments, channel improvement, diversions), and non-structural measures, which reduce damage without building works (flood plain zoning, forecasting and warning, insurance, land use control).

Dams and levees are physical structures, so the approach is structural, not non-structural. 'Curvilinear' and 'staggened' are not recognised categories of flood management.

Answer: C

The incorrect pair is Coal : Inorganic.

Coal formed from the remains of plants buried in swamps and altered by heat and pressure over millions of years. Because it comes from living matter, it is classed as an organic (biotic) resource, like petroleum, even though it is mined like a mineral. It is non-renewable, but not inorganic.

The other pairs follow the standard classifications. By ownership, forests within a country's boundaries are national resources. Tides depend on the pull of the moon and the sun and will not run out with use, so they are inexhaustible. Wild animals reproduce and can be replenished if they are not overexploited, so they are renewable resources.

Answer: C

The key's answer is bamboo.

Textbook descriptions of the equatorial rainforest list its valuable hardwoods: ebony, mahogany and rosewood, along with greenheart and rubber, growing in a dense, multi-layered evergreen forest.

Bamboo is presented instead as typical of the tropical monsoon (deciduous) forests, with their dry season, as in India and Southeast Asia. Bamboos do occur in some rainforests, but in the textbook classification of forest types they belong to the monsoon forests, and that is the reading the key follows.

Answer: A

The responsible factor is changes in physical environment.

The distribution of plants and animals over the earth depends above all on physical conditions: climate (temperature, rainfall, light), relief and altitude, soil, and water. These vary from place to place, producing distinct biomes from tropical rainforest to tundra, each with its own flora and fauna.

Social, cultural and technological change can modify vegetation and wildlife locally, through clearing, farming and introductions, but they do not account for the broad global variation in flora and fauna. So the options naming them, and the combined option (B) and (C), are wrong.

Answer: C

The vascular plants are the Pteridophyta.

Pteridophytes, the ferns, horsetails and club mosses, are the first group of plants with true vascular tissue: xylem to carry water and phloem to carry food, together with true roots, stems and leaves. That is why they are called the vascular cryptogams.

Algae are simple, largely aquatic organisms with no vascular tissue. Fungi are not plants at all; they are heterotrophs with walls of chitin. Lichens are partnerships between a fungus and an alga or cyanobacterium, again without vascular tissue.

Answer: B

Deep ecology is associated with Arne Naess.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the term in 1973, contrasting 'shallow' environmentalism, concerned with pollution and resources for human benefit, with a 'deep' ecology that holds that all living beings have value in themselves, independent of their usefulness to people.

James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis of the earth as a self-regulating system, which is related but different. D. Hughes and J. Emel are writers on environmental history and resource geography, not the originators of deep ecology.