Population and Settlement Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

A town must have at least 5000 people.

The Census of India treats as urban every place with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee (statutory towns), and also any place that meets three criteria together (census towns): a population of at least 5,000, at least 75 per cent of the male main workers engaged outside agriculture, and a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre.

10,000 is not the census threshold for a town. 50,000 and 500,000 are far too high; in the census size classes, places of 1,00,000 and above are classed as cities, and 10 lakh and above as million-plus cities.

Answer: C

The key's answer is Histo-genetic.

The approaches recognised in population geography are the systematic approach (studying a population attribute such as fertility or migration across regions), the regional approach, the behavioural approach (examining the decisions behind migration and fertility) and the systems approach (treating population and its environment as interacting parts of a system).

'Histo-genetic' is not among the approaches set out in the standard texts, so it is the one that is not an approach in population geography.

Answer: B

The concept was used by Harris and Ullman.

In their multiple nuclei model (1945), Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman argued that a city grows around several centres rather than one. Besides the central business district, they identified other nuclei, including an outlying business district, a secondary shopping centre in the suburbs, together with heavy industry and residential suburbs.

Burgess's concentric zone model (1925) and Hoyt's sector model (1939) are both built around a single CBD and have no outlying business district.

Answer: D

Dry point settlements are commonly found in riverine regions.

A dry point site is a patch of higher ground that stays dry in an area otherwise prone to flooding or waterlogging: a river terrace, a levee, a mound in a marsh or a delta. In flood plains and deltas, villages cluster on such points to escape the floods.

The opposite type, the wet point settlement, grows around a reliable water source in a dry area, such as a spring or oasis in a desert. Plateaus and mountains are not generally flood-prone, so they do not produce dry point settlements.

Answer: C

The correct matching is a-2, b-3, c-1, d-4.

• Transhumance: seasonal movement of herders with their animals, up to mountain pastures in summer and down to valleys in winter, as with the Gujjars and Bakarwals.
• Emigration: movement out of (from) a country.
• Commuting: daily movement, usually from home to work in urban areas and back.
• Immigration: movement into a country.

The trap is the emigration/immigration pair: 'e-' (out of) and 'im-' (into). The other codes mix these, or give commuting and transhumance each other's descriptions.

Answer: B

The process is gentrification.

The term was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe middle-class and professional households moving into run-down working-class areas of inner London, renovating the housing and so raising property values and displacing the original residents.

Counter-urbanisation is the opposite movement, of people out of cities into smaller towns and the countryside. Necropolis is Mumford's term for the final, dead stage of a city's life cycle, and a conurbation (misspelt Corbunation here) is a large urban region formed by merging towns.

Answer: A

The central place serves 6,000 and the complementary region 12,000.

Under Christaller's marketing principle (\(K = 3\)), each higher-order market area contains the central place's own share plus one third of each of the six surrounding lower-order places, three units in all. One of those three units is the central place and the other two make up its complementary region:

\[ \begin{aligned} \text{central place} &= \frac{18{,}000}{3} = 6{,}000 \\ \text{complementary region} &= 18{,}000 - 6{,}000 \\ &= 12{,}000 \end{aligned} \]

A 1 : 2 split fits only the first option. The others would need a different K value or an arbitrary split.

Answer: C

The umland is also called the city-region.

Umland (German, 'the land around') is the area surrounding a town that is tied to it economically and socially: it sends its people to work, shop and study in the town, and receives the town's goods and services. The town and its umland together form a functional city-region, which is also known as the urban field or sphere of influence.

The CBD is the commercial core inside the city, the peri-urban zone is the transitional fringe immediately beyond the built-up area, and an urban continuum describes a gradation of settlement types, so none of these is the umland as a whole.

Answer: D

The country is in stage III.

In the demographic transition model, stage I has high birth and death rates (both above about 35 per 1,000), stage II has high birth rates and falling death rates (II (a) early and II (b) late expanding), and the final stage has low birth and low death rates with slow growth.

A crude birth rate of 15 and a crude death rate of 12 per 1,000 are both low, giving natural growth of only 0.3% a year, which marks the low stationary stage, numbered III in this scheme. Stages I and II need birth rates far higher than 15.

Answer: A

The sequence of the demographic transition is (3), (4), (2), (1).

1. High birth and death rates: pre-industrial societies, with slow growth.
2. Death rates decline while birth rates remain high: better food, sanitation and medicine, giving rapid growth.
3. Both birth and death rates decline: birth rates fall with urbanisation, education and family planning.
4. Low birth and death rates: growth slows and stabilises.

The model always starts with high rates and ends with low ones, which rules out the options beginning with (1). The option putting (2) before (4) has birth rates falling before death rates, the reverse of what the transition records.