Landforms of Erosion and Deposition — Which Agent Made Which Shape

Two Force Families, One Simple Rule

Every hill, valley and beach you have seen was either cut or built by something. Two force families do the work.

• ›Endogenic forces come from inside the Earth — earthquakes, volcanoes, folding, faulting. They build the big relief.
• ›Exogenic forces come from outside — running water, moving ice, groundwater, wind and sea waves. They carve that relief into the shapes we actually name.

Each exogenic agent does three jobs in sequence: erosion (cutting material loose), transport (carrying it), deposition (dropping it). That one sentence organises the whole chapter — every landform on the syllabus is one agent doing one of those three jobs.

Running water is the most widespread agent on Earth; ice is the most powerful where it exists; wind matters only where no vegetation holds the soil.

Exams almost never ask you to define erosion. They ask "which agent formed this?" So learn the list by agent, never alphabetically.

1. Which of these is a landform of glacial DEPOSITION?

2. The two horns of a barchan dune point —

3. Karst topography takes its name from a limestone region located in —

4. Which of these Indian rivers does NOT form a delta at its mouth?

5. The correct order in which coastal landforms develop is —

6. Which of the following is a landform produced by wind EROSION?

7. An arête is best described as —

8. Chilika, on India's east coast, is an example of a —