Population and Settlement Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: C

A city region is an area around the city over which the city exercises a dominant influence in relation to other neighbouring cities of equal importance.

The concept, associated with R. E. Dickinson, describes the umland or sphere of influence of a city: the surrounding area tied to it for services, trade, employment, news and administration, where its pull is stronger than that of any competing city of similar rank.

An administratively demarcated area is a municipal or district unit, not a functional region. Transport linkage alone does not define dominance, since a city has links far beyond its region. An area supplying food and labour describes only part of the hinterland's role, and it lies around the city, not within it.

Answer: B

The country is in the transition stage.

In the demographic transition model the pre-transition stage has both birth and death rates high, around 35 to 50 per thousand, and close together, so growth is slow. In the transition stage the death rate falls first, while the birth rate stays high. A crude birth rate of 35 with a death rate of about 20 per thousand fits this: deaths have begun to fall but births have not, and the natural increase is about 1.5 percent a year.

In the post-transition stage both rates are low, around 10 to 15 per thousand, so that option is wrong, and the data are enough to place the country, so 'indetermined' is wrong too.

Answer: D

All four zones belong to the model, so the answer is (1), (2), (3) and (4) are correct.

Harris and Ullman's multiple nuclei model (1945) holds that a city grows around several separate nuclei rather than a single centre. Its zones are the central business district, wholesale and light manufacturing, low-, medium- and high-class residential areas, heavy manufacturing, an outlying business district, a residential suburb and an industrial suburb.

The central business district, the industrial suburb, the outlying business district and the residential suburb are all named zones of the model, so every option leaving any of them out is incomplete.

Answer: C

1921 is called the year of the demographic divide because the mortality rate began to decline, leading to accelerated population growth.

Before 1921 India's population grew slowly and irregularly, because famines, plague and the influenza epidemic of 1918 kept death rates very high; the 1911-1921 decade even recorded a fall in population. After 1921 the death rate fell steadily with better famine relief, public health measures and control of epidemics, while the birth rate stayed high, so the population has grown every decade since.

Fertility did not rise sharply after 1921, urbanisation remained slow for decades, and the change was the start of rapid growth, not demographic stability.

Answer: A

Both statements are true and the Reason explains the Assertion.

In the first, high stationary stage of the demographic transition, both birth and death rates are high. The birth rate is fairly steady, but the death rate swings from year to year: it shoots up in years of epidemic, famine or war, and falls back in good years.

The Reason gives exactly why: with little medicine and an uncertain food supply, mortality responded directly to outbreaks of disease and to good or bad harvests. So the Reason explains why mortality was not only high but fluctuating, which rules out the options saying it does not explain the Assertion or that either is false.

Answer: C

The forces were postulated by G. K. Zipf.

George Kingsley Zipf, in National Unity and Disunity (1941) and Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (1949), argued that the size distribution of settlements reflects a balance between two opposing forces: a force of diversification, which scatters population into many small places close to resources, and a force of unification, which concentrates it into a few large centres to save the effort of moving goods. The balance produces his rank-size rule.

Homer Hoyt proposed the sector model of urban land use, Edward Ullman the multiple nuclei model with Harris, and Mark Jefferson the law of the primate city, so none of them framed these two forces.

Answer: C

The technique is nearest neighbour analysis.

Developed by the ecologists Clark and Evans and applied to settlements by geographers, it compares the mean observed distance from each settlement to its nearest neighbour with the distance expected if the same number of points were randomly spread over the area. The ratio Rn runs from 0 (all clustered) through 1.0 (random) to 2.15 (perfectly uniform), so it measures spacing objectively.

The gravity model and the break-point theory measure interaction between two places, and a concentration index measures how unevenly something is distributed among areas, not the spacing between settlements.

Answer: C

The key's answer is Frequent boundary modification both within the country and at international scale.

A census counts people within administrative units: districts, states and countries. When those boundaries change between censuses, as when new districts or states are carved out or national borders shift, figures for the same named unit are no longer comparable over time. This is a well-known limitation of census data for studying population change.

Changes in demographic parameters are what a census measures, not a limitation of it. Census enumerators and governments change, but census procedures and definitions are standardised precisely so that such changes do not affect the data.

Answer: D

The answer is Mortality and infant mortality rate.

After the Second World War, antibiotics, vaccination, malaria control with DDT, safer water and better sanitation spread quickly, especially in developing countries. Death rates fell steeply, and deaths of infants, who are most vulnerable to infectious disease, fell most of all. This sudden fall in mortality while birth rates stayed high drove the population explosion of the mid-twentieth century.

Fertility did not fall at once; it declined decades later. 'Only mortality' and 'only infant mortality' are each incomplete, since both fell together.

Answer: D

The statement that is not true is India is the first country in the world to develop smart cities.

Smart city projects existed elsewhere long before India's Smart Cities Mission was launched in 2015, for example Songdo in South Korea and Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, and cities such as Barcelona and Singapore had adopted smart technologies.

The other statements are true. Since about 2007 more of the world's people have lived in urban than in rural areas. Urbanisation is now much faster in less developed countries than in developed ones, which are already largely urban. In India, Class-I cities (100,000 people or more) held about 70 per cent of the urban population at the 2011 Census.