Population and Settlement Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Statements (1), (3) and (4) are true, so the answer is (1), (3) and (4) are true.

Mark Jefferson's law of the primate city (1939) describes a city that is disproportionately large (1) and exceptionally larger than the second city of its country or region (3), and dominant in its economic, political and cultural life. India has such cities at the state level, for example Kolkata in West Bengal (4).

Statement (2) is false: a primate city is defined by its size and dominance, not by religion. Bangkok, Paris and Mexico City are primate cities without being religious centres. Every option including (2), or leaving out (4), is wrong.

Answer: B

The factor that does not change a country's total population is internal migration.

A country's population changes through only three components: births, deaths and migration across its borders. Internal migration, people moving from one region of the country to another, for example from villages to cities, redistributes the population but leaves the national total unchanged.

External migration and refugee movements across the border add people to or take them from the country, and higher fertility than mortality means more births than deaths, a natural increase. All three alter the total size of the population.

Answer: D

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

• Stationary pyramid: unchanging fertility and mortality, so each age group stays much the same size.
• Progressive (expanding) pyramid: high birth and death rates, giving a broad base and narrow top.
• Regressive (constrictive) pyramid: declining birth rate and low mortality, giving a base narrower than the middle.
• Bell-shaped pyramid: low birth and death rates.

The progressive pyramid with high birth and death rates is the anchor. Only one option combines it with a stationary pyramid of unchanging rates, so the rest are wrong.

Answer: B

The answer is both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

Assertion (A) is correct: when birth rates are high, each new cohort is larger than the one before it, so a large proportion of the population is in the younger age groups, which gives the pyramid its broad base.

Reason (R) is also correct: industrialisation, with urban living, education and the changing economic value of children, has helped bring fertility down. But (R) is about why fertility falls, while (A) is about the age structure that high fertility produces, so (R) does not explain (A).

Answer: A

A small settlement usually characterised by a single economic activity is a hamlet.

A hamlet is the smallest unit of rural settlement: a small cluster of houses, often an offshoot of a larger village, whose people follow one main occupation, usually farming, herding or fishing. It has few or no services of its own.

A village is larger and supports several functions and services. A rurban centre combines rural and urban functions, and an urban fringe village lies at the edge of a city and is shaped by mixed urban and rural activities. None of these is defined by a single economic activity.

Answer: B

Physiological density is the number of people per square unit of farm land.

Arithmetic density divides the population by the total area, which hides how much of the land can actually feed people. Physiological (nutritional) density divides the population by the area of cultivable land instead, so it shows the pressure of population on the land that produces food. Egypt, for example, has a modest arithmetic density but a very high physiological density.

People per unit of total land is arithmetic density, and farmers per unit of farm land is agricultural density. Carrying capacity is the population an area can support, a different concept.

Answer: A

A bulge in a population pyramid indicates unusually high fertility or mortality or changes in population due to effects of migration.

A bulge means one age group is larger than those around it. That happens when a cohort was born during a period of unusually high fertility, such as a post-war baby boom, when the cohorts around it were thinned by unusually high mortality, or when migration has added people of particular ages, as when young working-age migrants concentrate in a city.

War and famine make notches or indentations, not bulges. Rapid ageing shows as a narrowing base and a widening top, and women joining the workforce does not change the age structure.

Answer: C

Ageing at the base occurs when fertility declines and new birth cohorts are smaller than previous ones.

A population can age in two ways. Ageing at the base happens when falling fertility makes each new cohort of births smaller than the last, so the base of the pyramid narrows and the share of children falls while the share of older people rises. Ageing at the apex happens when falling mortality lets more people survive to old age.

A constant child share means no ageing at the base, a fall in child mortality actually enlarges the young groups, and fluctuation between cohorts is irregularity rather than ageing.

Answer: B

The hierarchy is 81 (1, 2, 6, 18, 54).

In Christaller's marketing principle (K = 3), each higher-order place serves its own market area plus a third of each of the six surrounding lower-order areas, so the number of places served at each level grows by a factor of three: 1, 3, 9, 27, 81. The number of new centres added at each order is the difference between successive totals:

\[ \begin{aligned} &1,\ 3 - 1 = 2,\ 9 - 3 = 6 \\ &27 - 9 = 18,\ 81 - 27 = 54 \end{aligned} \]

These add up to 81. The other sequences do not grow by the factor of three, and A does not even total 81.

Answer: B

The answer is (c) and (d): a rapid decline in mortality and birth rates exceeding death rates.

Since the Industrial Revolution, better food supply, sanitation, medicine and public health have sharply reduced death rates, while birth rates fell much more slowly. The resulting excess of births over deaths, natural increase, is what made world population grow so rapidly, as described by the demographic transition model.

Urbanisation and migration redistribute people between places but do not by themselves add to the world's total population, so options that include (a) or (b) are wrong, and (d) alone leaves out the fall in mortality that caused it.