Population and Settlement Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Both (A) and (R) are correct and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Many developed countries, such as France, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the Nordic states, follow pronatalist policies: child allowances, paid parental leave, tax benefits and subsidised childcare, all intended to raise the birth rate (A).

They do so because their fertility has fallen below replacement level, leading to ageing populations, shrinking workforces and pressure on pension and health systems (R). The low or stationary birth rate is the reason for the policy focus, so (R) explains (A).

Answer: A

The answer is (A) Natural growth rate method.

Internal migration is estimated either directly from records or census questions, or indirectly. The residual (vital statistics) method takes the change in population between two censuses and subtracts natural increase, so what remains is net migration. The survival rate method projects each age cohort forward with survival ratios and treats the gap from the later census as net migration. The net migration rate is itself the measure of migration: net migrants per thousand of the population.

Natural growth is births minus deaths, and it contains no movement of people at all. It is an input that the residual method removes, not a way of measuring migration. The paper may have meant the national growth rate method, which is an indirect estimate of migration, but as printed A is the only option that is not a measure.

Answer: A

The state is Bihar.

Bihar is one of the most rural states of India, with close to 90 percent of its people in villages, and it has the highest population density among the major states, over 1,100 persons per square kilometre in the 2011 Census. Its fertile, flat Ganga plain supports closely spaced, large villages, so both its rural population density and the density of its villages are very high.

Uttar Pradesh is also dense but less so than Bihar. Odisha and especially Meghalaya, with large hilly and forested areas, have far lower rural densities.

Answer: D

The item not in the policy is covering 80 percent of school-going children for nutritional supplementation.

The National Population Policy, 2000 set national socio-demographic goals for 2010, including reducing the infant mortality rate to below 30 per 1,000 live births, reducing the maternal mortality ratio to below 100 per 1,00,000 live births, and achieving 80 percent institutional deliveries and 100 percent deliveries by trained persons. It also aimed at universal immunisation and a total fertility rate at replacement level.

A target of nutritional supplementation for 80 percent of school-going children is not among those goals.

Answer: B

The first National Sample Survey was carried out in 1950-51.

The National Sample Survey was set up in 1950 on the initiative of P.C. Mahalanobis, and its first round was conducted from October 1950 to March 1951 to collect socio-economic data through sample households and villages. (It was organised by the NSS under the government's statistical system, with the Indian Statistical Institute, rather than by the Registrar General of India, who conducts the Census, but the date is the point of the question.)

1951-52, 1952-53 and 1953-54 are the years of later rounds.

Answer: B

Situation concerns physical and cultural conditions over a much wider area.

Geographers distinguish site from situation. Site is the actual ground on which a settlement stands, its local physical features such as relief, water supply and defence. Situation is the location relative to the wider surroundings: the region, routes, resources and other settlements over a much larger area.

A latitude-longitude address is absolute location. 'The place where a settlement is situated' describes the site. The relationship of a dwelling to its immediate surroundings is narrower than the regional view that situation takes.

Answer: C

The model is the gravity model.

Borrowing Newton's law, the gravity model holds that the interaction between two places, including migration, is directly proportional to the product of their populations and inversely proportional to the distance between them (often its square). Large, nearby places exchange the most migrants. Zipf's P₁P₂/D hypothesis is its classic form in migration.

Push-pull and Lee's models explain migration through factors at origin and destination and intervening obstacles, and Zelinsky's mobility transition links migration to stages of development. None of them is defined by population size and distance.

Answer: C

The equilibrium is called optimum population.

Optimum population is the size of population that, with the available resources and technology, gives the highest standard of living or income per head. At that point population and resources are in balance.

Over-population means there are too many people for the resources, lowering living standards, and under-population too few to use the resources fully. 'Optional population' is not a demographic term.

Answer: C

The state with the highest sex ratio is Kerala.

By the Census of 2011, Kerala had 1,084 females per 1,000 males, the highest of any state and the only one with more women than men by a wide margin; the national figure was 943.

The other states were well below it: Uttar Pradesh about 912, Madhya Pradesh about 931 and (undivided) Andhra Pradesh about 993.

Answer: D

The answer is 18th.

Tripura's density in the 2011 Census was 350 persons per square kilometre, which the State Government's own publications give as 18th at the all-India level. Eleven states (Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Jharkhand, Assam, Goa and Maharashtra) and six union territories were denser, which places Tripura 18th among all states and union territories.

15th, 16th and 17th would put Tripura above states or territories that are in fact less dense, or below ones that were not denser than it.