Population and Settlement Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Push and pull factors explain Migration.

In population geography, push factors are conditions that drive people away from a place (unemployment, poverty, disaster, conflict) and pull factors are those that attract them to another (jobs, better wages, services, security). Together they explain why people move.

Land degradation is caused by erosion, overgrazing and deforestation, and slums are one outcome of rapid migration to cities, not what the push-pull model describes. Since migration fits, 'None of these' is wrong.

Answer: A

Both statements are correct and the reason explains the assertion. Metropolitan cities are numerically dominated by adult males because many migrants to the cities come alone for work, and migration is selective of age and sex, with young adult men moving most, so the surplus of males follows from the selectivity.

Option B would say that the reason does not explain it, but selectivity is exactly the cause of the male-heavy structure. Options C and D wrongly call one statement false.

Answer: A

The rural to rural stream is the largest in India. A large part of it consists of women who move at marriage within the countryside, together with movement of agricultural labour between villages, so it makes up well over half of all migrants.

Rural to urban migration is the next stream and gets more attention, but it is smaller in volume. Urban to urban and urban to rural moves are smaller still. So option A is the key.

Answer: D

Ecumenopolis is the projected urbanised world or universal city, a term proposed by C.A. Doxiadis for a continuous urban settlement covering the whole inhabited earth, expected by the end of the twenty-first century.

A conurbation is a continuous urban area formed by the merging of cities (Geddes), a city-region is a city together with the region it influences, and megalopolis (Gottmann) is the chain of cities along the north-eastern seaboard of the United States. Only ecumenopolis is global in scope.

Answer: B

In nearest neighbour analysis, the value Rn of 1.00 indicates a random distribution of settlements. The value is the ratio of the observed mean distance to the distance expected for a random pattern, so it equals one when the two are equal.

A value near 0 (such as 0.49) shows clustering, and the value approaches 2.15 for a perfectly uniform, hexagonal pattern. A value of 1.59 lies between random and uniform and indicates a tendency towards regularity. So only 1.00 marks randomness.

Answer: C

The number of children who die in the first year of life per thousand live births in a year is the infant mortality rate (IMR). It is a sensitive indicator of the health and welfare of a society.

The death rate is the number of deaths per thousand of the total population, the standardised mortality rate adjusts death rates for age structure, and life expectancy is the average number of years a newborn is expected to live. None of these measures deaths of infants specifically.

Answer: A

The 2011 Census literacy rates were: Kerala 93.9 percent, Mizoram 91.6, Tripura 87.8 and Goa 87.4. The descending order is Kerala, Mizoram, Tripura, Goa.

Options B, C and D put Goa above Mizoram or Tripura, or Mizoram above Kerala, which is not the order of the census figures. Only option A has the four states in the correct descending order.

Answer: C

Auerbach was the first to note the regularity between the sizes of cities and their rank, in 1913. This later became the rank-size rule, and Zipf developed it in 1949 with his formula, so Zipf is the popular name but not the first.

Jefferson proposed the law of the primate city, and Christaller proposed central place theory, so they are not linked with the first observation of rank and size.

The rank-size rule says that the population of a town ranked n is about 1/n of the population of the largest city. Auerbach noted the pattern in 1913, Zipf popularised it in the 1940s, and Jefferson's primate city law is a contrasting idea, where the first city is much bigger than the second.

Answer: A

Chandigarh recorded the highest density of population among the options in the 2011 census, at over 9,000 persons per square kilometre. It is a small union territory with a large urban population.

West Bengal, Kerala and Maharashtra are states with much lower density, so each is wrong.

Density is the number of persons per square kilometre. Chandigarh, being a city territory of about 114 square kilometres, has a very high density, whereas the three states have densities in the hundreds, since they include large rural and forest areas.

Answer: C

Under the transport principle (k = 4) of central place theory, each central place serves its own area and a share of neighbouring areas, and the number of centres of each lower order is four times greater. The population should therefore be about a quarter of that of the next higher town.

With the highest order town at 4.0 lakh, the next lower order town has 1.0 lakh. 3.0 lakh and 2.0 lakh are too large and 0.5 lakh is too small for the 1:4 relation.