Location and Map Based

• Option (a) is wrongly matched. The Abyssinian Plateau is the Ethiopian Highlands in the Horn of Africa, not Arabia; the two are separated by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, though they share a rifting history.
• Option (b) is correctly matched. The Atlas Mountains run through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in north western Africa, formed by the collision of the African and Eurasian plates.
• Option (c) is wrongly matched. The Guiana Highlands are in northern South America, spanning Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and northern Brazil, and are part of the Guiana Shield; they are not in Africa at all.
• Option (d) is wrongly matched twice over. The Okavango Basin is in southern Africa, the river terminating in an inland delta in Botswana, while Patagonia is in southern Argentina and Chile. The elimination route is simply continental: options (c) and (d) each pair a feature from one continent with a region on another, and (a) crosses from Africa to Asia, leaving (b) as the only pair internally consistent in location.

• Option (a) is correct. The Ten Degree Channel, so named because it runs approximately along the parallel of ten degrees north, separates the Andaman group to the north from the Nicobar group to the south, and is about one hundred and fifty kilometres wide.
• Option (b) is incorrect. Nicobar is separated from Sumatra by the Great Channel, also called the Six Degree Channel, lying near six degrees north.
• Option (c) is incorrect. Lakshadweep is divided internally by the Eight Degree Channel, which separates Minicoy from the main Lakshadweep group, and by the Nine Degree Channel; the Eight Degree Channel also separates Minicoy from the Maldives.
• Option (d) is incorrect. Sumatra and Java are separated by the Sunda Strait, a tectonically active passage that contains Krakatoa. The elimination route is arithmetic rather than cartographic: the channels of this region are named for the latitudes they follow, so a candidate who fixes the approximate latitude of each pair can place the Ten Degree Channel without recalling the specific fact.

• Option (b) is correct. Turkey occupies Anatolia and eastern Thrace, with the Black Sea along its entire northern coast and the Mediterranean along its southern coast, the two being connected through Turkish territory by the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles, which is the strategic fact that gives the country its importance and is regulated by the Montreux Convention of 1936.
• Option (a) is incorrect. Turkey does not touch the Caspian, which is an enclosed basin bordered by Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan; Turkey is separated from it by Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijani territory.
• Option (c) is incorrect. The Gulf of Suez lies at the northern end of the Red Sea and the land between it and the Mediterranean is Egypt, traversed by the Suez Canal.
• Option (d) is incorrect. The Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea lie on either side of the Wadi Araba in the Levant, between Israel and Jordan. The item is decided by knowing where the Turkish Straits are, since the whole point of Turkey's position is that it controls the only passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

• Option (c) is correct. Proceeding from south to north the order is Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Hanoi. Jakarta lies on the north-west coast of Java at about six degrees south, and is the only one of the four in the southern hemisphere. Singapore sits at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula at about one degree north, almost on the equator. Bangkok lies at the head of the Gulf of Thailand at about fourteen degrees north. Hanoi lies in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam at about twenty-one degrees north, and is the northernmost.
• Options (a) and (d) both begin with Singapore, which cannot be right because Jakarta is further south than any of the others.
• Option (b) places Hanoi second, which cannot be right because Hanoi is the northernmost of the four. The reliable method is to anchor the sequence at both ends rather than to attempt the whole ordering at once: fixing Jakarta as the southernmost and Hanoi as the northernmost leaves only Singapore and Bangkok to be ordered between them, and Singapore's position on the equator settles that.

• Option (d) is correct. The easternmost point of India lies in Arunachal Pradesh near Kibithu in Anjaw district at about 97 degrees 25 minutes East, and the westernmost point lies in Gujarat at Guhar Moti in the Kachchh region at about 68 degrees 7 minutes East.
• Options (a) and (c) fail because Assam lies well west of Arunachal Pradesh.
• Options (a) and (b) fail because Rajasthan, though it has the longest stretch of the western international border and is the largest State by area, does not reach as far west as the Kachchh peninsula. The trap is the association of Rajasthan with India's western extremity, which is true of the border but not of longitude.

• Pair 1 is incorrect: Bodhgaya lies in Bihar, in the historic region of Magadha, whereas Baghelkhand is the plateau region of eastern Madhya Pradesh around Rewa and Satna.
• Pair 2 is correct: Khajuraho lies in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, squarely within Bundelkhand, the region straddling Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh that takes its name from the Bundela Rajputs.
• Pair 3 is incorrect: Shirdi is in Ahmednagar district in western Maharashtra, whereas Vidarbha is the eastern region of the State around Nagpur and Amravati.
• Pair 4 is incorrect: Nashik lies in northern Maharashtra, in the tract conventionally called Khandesh or North Maharashtra, whereas Malwa is the plateau of western Madhya Pradesh around Indore and Ujjain.
• Pair 5 is correct: Tirupati is in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, within Rayalaseema, the southern interior region of the State. Hence 2 and 5, giving (c). The elimination route is efficient: recognising either that Bodhgaya is in Bihar or that Shirdi is not in Vidarbha removes three of the four options, since only (c) excludes both. The item tests regional rather than administrative geography, which is what makes it harder than it looks.

• Option (a) is correct. Great Nicobar is the southernmost island of the Nicobar group, and Indira Point at its southern tip is the southernmost point of India. The Great Channel, roughly one hundred and forty five kilometres wide, separates Indira Point from Banda Aceh at the northern tip of Sumatra, which makes Sumatra by a wide margin the nearest of the four. This proximity is the reason the Andaman and Nicobar chain is geologically continuous with the Arakan Yoma and the Sumatran arc, all of them part of the same accretionary ridge above the Sunda subduction zone, and it is why the 2004 Sumatra Andaman earthquake and tsunami struck the Nicobars so severely.
• Option (b) is wrong: Borneo lies far to the east, beyond Sumatra and the Java Sea.
• Option (c) is wrong: Java lies south east of Sumatra and is correspondingly further.
• Option (d) is the distractor a candidate reaches for by reflex, Sri Lanka being the familiar neighbour, but it lies to the west across the whole width of the Bay of Bengal, well over a thousand kilometres away, and the mental habit of associating India with Sri Lanka is exactly what the item exploits. Governing principle: the Andaman and Nicobar islands lie in the eastern Bay of Bengal and are nearer to South East Asia than to the Indian mainland, Port Blair being closer to Myanmar and Great Nicobar closer to Indonesia.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Aleppo is Syria's largest city and its industrial and commercial centre, and the battle for it from 2012 to 2016 was the defining engagement of the Syrian civil war.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched. Kirkuk is in northern Iraq, the centre of a major oil field and a disputed city claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government; federal forces took control of it in October 2017 after the Kurdish independence referendum.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. Mosul is Iraq's second city, on the Tigris, held by the Islamic State from 2014 and recaptured after a nine month campaign that ended in July 2017.
• Pair 4 is correctly matched. Mazar i Sharif is the principal city of northern Afghanistan and the seat of the shrine attributed to Ali. Only pairs 1 and 4 are correct, so the answer is (b). The elimination is quick and does not require all four facts. Kirkuk and Mosul are both Iraqi, and once either is recognised as such, options (a), (c) and (d) each contain a wrong pair and fall away, leaving only (b). Governing principle: the examiner has deliberately displaced two Iraqi cities into Yemen and Palestine, so a candidate who has the Iraq theatre clear in mind needs nothing else.

Hence (b).

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain with Barcelona as its capital, and its unilateral independence referendum of October 2017 and the direct rule that followed under Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution are the reason it appeared in the news.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched. Crimea is a peninsula on the northern Black Sea, part of Ukraine and annexed by Russia in 2014; it has no connection with Hungary, which is landlocked.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. Mindanao is the large southern island of the Philippines, the seat of the long Moro insurgency and of the Bangsamoro autonomy process, and the site of the siege of Marawi in 2017 after which martial law was imposed.
• Pair 4 is incorrectly matched. Oromia is the largest regional state of Ethiopia, home of the Oromo, whose protests from 2015 led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and the accession of Abiy Ahmed in April 2018. Nigeria's regions in the news are the north east under Boko Haram and the Niger Delta. Only pairs 1 and 3 are correct, so the answer is (c). The elimination is efficient: recognising Crimea as Ukrainian removes options (a) and (d), and recognising Oromia as Ethiopian removes (b), leaving (c) without any need to verify the two correct pairs.

Hence (c).

• Pair 1 is correct. Albania faces the Adriatic Sea on its western coast, north of the Strait of Otranto, along with Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.
• Pair 2 is incorrect. Croatia is an Adriatic country, not a Black Sea one. The Black Sea is bordered by Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia.
• Pair 3 is correct. Kazakhstan holds the long northern and north eastern shore of the Caspian, one of its five littoral states along with Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan.
• Pair 4 is correct. Morocco has a Mediterranean coast on its north, facing Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar, in addition to its longer Atlantic coast.
• Pair 5 is incorrect. Syria borders the Mediterranean, not the Red Sea, whose littoral states are Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan. Since pairs 1, 3 and 4 hold, the official answer (b) follows. The elimination is efficient. Recognising that Syria has no Red Sea coast removes options (c) and (d) at once, and recognising Croatia as an Adriatic state removes (a), leaving (b) without any need to adjudicate the Caspian or Moroccan pairs.

The Siachen glacier lies in the eastern Karakoram, and its meltwater feeds the Nubra river, which flows south from the glacier snout to join the Shyok. The glacier therefore lies at the head of and to the north of the Nubra valley, giving (d).

• Option (a) is wrong because Aksai Chin lies far to the east, on the Tibetan plateau margin, so Siachen is west of it rather than the reverse.
• Option (b) is wrong because Leh lies to the south, on the Indus, and the route to the glacier runs north from Leh over the Khardung La into the Nubra valley.
• Option (c) is wrong because Gilgit lies well to the west in the territory held by Pakistan, so the glacier is to its east. Fixing the Nubra valley on the mental map is the single step that answers the question, since the glacier and the valley form one continuous drainage line.

Afghanistan's northern frontier is formed by three Central Asian republics. Tajikistan shares the longest of these borders, running largely along the Panj headwater of the Amu Darya. Uzbekistan shares a short border in the north, crossed by the Friendship Bridge at Termez and Hairatan. Turkmenistan borders Afghanistan in the north west. Country 1, Azerbaijan, lies in the South Caucasus, separated from Afghanistan by the Caspian Sea and the whole width of Turkmenistan or Iran, and shares no border with it. Country 2, Kyrgyzstan, lies to the north east beyond Tajikistan, and the intervening Tajik territory, including the Wakhan corridor arrangement, keeps the two apart.

• Items 3, 4 and 5 therefore qualify and (c) is correct.
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each admit Azerbaijan or Kyrgyzstan or both, and the Kyrgyzstan error is the more tempting because it is genuinely a Central Asian state.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Anatolia, or Asia Minor, is the great peninsula that forms the Asian portion of Turkey and the bulk of its territory.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Amhara is a region of Ethiopia, neighbouring Tigray, and was drawn into the war that began in that region.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. Cabo Delgado is the northernmost province of Mozambique, in the news for an Islamist insurgency that displaced hundreds of thousands and disrupted a major offshore gas development; the Portuguese name is what makes Spain a plausible looking distractor.
• Pair 4 is incorrectly matched. Catalonia is in Spain, not Italy, with Barcelona as its capital and an independence movement that has long strained Spanish politics. Exactly two pairs are correct, giving (b). The question is well constructed in that the two errors are paired: a candidate who knows Catalonia is Spanish is invited to attach Spain to Cabo Delgado, and options (a), (c) and (d) each depend on one of these confusions.

The two places sit on opposite sides of the International Date Line, which runs roughly along the one hundred and eightieth meridian through the Bering Strait, deviating to keep territories whole.

• Statement I is correct: despite their proximity across the strait, Anadyr on the Russian side and Nome on the Alaskan side lie in different calendar days, since crossing the Date Line changes the date by one day irrespective of the small difference in longitude. This is the standard illustration of the Date Line's effect.
• Statement II is incorrect, and it reverses the direction. Anadyr lies west of the Date Line on the Asian side and is therefore ahead in date, at about UTC plus twelve, while Nome lies east of it on the American side and is behind, at about UTC minus nine. So when it is Monday in Anadyr it is Sunday in Nome, not Tuesday. The reliable rule is that travelling westward across the Date Line advances the date and travelling eastward sets it back, so the Asian side is always the later date. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (c) accept the reversed direction, and option (d) denies the date change altogether.

The question asks which statements are not correct, so the answer names the errors.

• Statement 1 is correct and is therefore not part of the answer, since Uttar Pradesh touches eight States, namely Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, besides the National Capital Territory, which is more than any other State, Assam coming next with seven.
• Statement 2 is not correct, because the longest international boundary of any Indian State belongs to West Bengal, which faces Bangladesh over roughly two thousand two hundred kilometres besides short stretches with Nepal and Bhutan, while Rajasthan's boundary with Pakistan is only about one thousand and seventy kilometres.
• Statement 3 is not correct, because Sikkim touches only West Bengal but is not unique in that respect, since Meghalaya touches only Assam. Hence 2 and 3 are the incorrect statements and (c) is right. (a) and (b) wrongly treat the accurate Uttar Pradesh claim as an error, and (d) misses the Rajasthan error.

Only statement 3 is correct, so (d) is the answer. The Mechi bridge over the Mechi river links the Panitanki bypass on the Indian side in West Bengal with Kakarvitta in Nepal, and it lies on the Asian Highway corridor.

• Statement 1 reverses the two ends. Maitri Setu does span the Feni river, but Sabroom is the Indian town in South Tripura and Ramgarh is on the Bangladesh side in Chittagong division, so the statement has placed each town in the wrong country.
• Statement 2 misidentifies the neighbour, since the Jhulaghat suspension bridge crosses the Kali or Mahakali river and connects Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand with the Baitadi district of Nepal, and India shares no bridge of that name with Myanmar. (a) and (c) accept the reversed Maitri Setu description and (a) and (b) accept the Myanmar error.