World Landmarks — Straits, Canals, Deserts and Mountain Ranges Worth Memorising

This is the part of geography that behaves like a vocabulary list, and it should be studied like one. No mechanism to understand, no diagram to draw — just names attached to places, worth one clean mark each in every general awareness paper written in this country.

The efficient way in is to learn by what a feature separates or joins, never by the name alone. A strait is a gap between two land masses that joins two water bodies, so every strait has four labels: two lands and two seas. A canal is the same idea built by hand. A desert is remembered by its superlative — largest, driest, coldest — and a mountain range by its record and its continent.

Five pages will not make you a geographer. They will let you answer, in about four seconds each, the questions this chapter has asked for the last twenty years.

1. Which strait separates India from Sri Lanka?

2. The Suez Canal connects:

3. Which is the longest mountain range on land?

4. The driest desert in the world is:

5. The world's longest strait is:

6. The Ural Mountains form the conventional boundary between:

7. The highest peak of Africa is:

8. The Panama Canal connects: