Tamil Nadu HSE First Year Geography flashcards
Tamil Nadu HSE First Year Geography · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Geography
- The spatial science studying the earth as the home of humans, integrating physical and social phenomena across scales from local to global.
- Systematic vs regional approach
- Systematic geography studies one theme across space; regional geography studies all themes within one defined region.
- Mohorovicic discontinuity
- The boundary separating the earth's crust from the mantle, marked by a sharp increase in seismic wave velocity at about 35 km depth.
- Gutenberg discontinuity
- The boundary between the mantle and the outer core at roughly 2,900 km depth, where S waves disappear, revealing a liquid outer core.
- Nebular hypothesis
- Kant and Laplace proposed that the solar system formed from a rotating cloud of gas and dust that condensed into the sun and planets.
- Plate boundary types
- Divergent boundaries create new crust at ridges; convergent boundaries produce trenches and fold mountains; transform boundaries slide past each other producing faults.
- Igneous rock
- Rock formed by cooling of magma or lava; intrusive types like granite cool slowly with large crystals, extrusive types like basalt cool quickly.
- Anticline and syncline
- An anticline is an upward-arching fold with oldest rocks at its core; a syncline is a downward trough with youngest rocks at its core.
- Lapse rate
- The rate at which temperature falls with height in the troposphere, averaging about 6.5 degrees Celsius per kilometre of ascent.
- Coriolis force
- The apparent deflection of moving air caused by earth's rotation, to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern.
- Relative humidity
- The ratio of actual water vapour in air to the maximum it can hold at that temperature, expressed as a percentage.
- Koppen climate classification
- A system grouping world climates into A tropical, B dry, C temperate, D cold and E polar types based on temperature and precipitation.
- Continental shelf
- The shallow submerged margin of a continent, generally less than 200 metres deep, rich in fisheries and petroleum resources.
- Salinity
- The mass of dissolved salts in seawater, averaging about 35 parts per thousand and highest in warm subtropical seas with high evaporation.
- Spring tide
- An unusually high tide occurring at new and full moon when the sun and moon align and their gravitational pulls reinforce each other.
- Soil horizon
- A distinct layer in a soil profile; O organic, A topsoil, B subsoil, C weathered parent material, R bedrock.
- Biome
- A large ecological region with characteristic climate, vegetation and animal life, such as tropical rainforest, savanna, desert, taiga or tundra.
- Biodiversity hotspot
- A region with exceptional endemic species richness that has lost a large share of its original habitat; India has four such hotspots.
- Demographic transition
- A model describing the shift from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as a society develops economically.
- Push and pull factors
- Push factors such as poverty or disaster drive people from a place; pull factors such as jobs and services attract them elsewhere.
- Primate city
- An urban centre disproportionately larger than the second city of its country, dominating economy, politics and culture.
- Representative fraction scale
- A map scale expressed as a ratio such as 1:50,000, meaning one unit on the map equals 50,000 of the same units on the ground.
- Contour line
- A line joining points of equal elevation on a map; closely spaced contours indicate steep slopes, widely spaced ones gentle slopes.
- Remote sensing
- Acquiring information about the earth's surface from sensors on satellites or aircraft, using reflected or emitted electromagnetic radiation.
- Vector and raster data
- Vector GIS data represent features as points, lines and polygons; raster data represent the surface as a grid of cells with values.
- Northeast monsoon
- The October to December monsoon that brings Tamil Nadu most of its annual rainfall, as winds pick up moisture over the Bay of Bengal.
- Cauvery delta
- The fertile rice-growing region of Tamil Nadu formed by the Cauvery river, often called the granary of the state.
- Field study method
- A structured enquiry involving objective setting, site selection, data collection through observation or questionnaire, tabulation, analysis and reporting.
- Tropic of Cancer in India
- The line of 23 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, which passes through eight Indian states including Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
- Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve
- India's first biosphere reserve, established in 1986 across the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, rich in endemic species.
- Gradient on a map
- The ratio of vertical rise to horizontal distance between two points, calculated from contour values and used to judge slope steepness.
- Image interpretation elements
- Visual cues used to read remote sensing images: tone, texture, pattern, shape, size, shadow and association with surrounding features.