NTA UGC NET/JRF EXAM. JUNE , 2019 (Paper II) Geography

Rasters are digital aerial photographs, imagery from satellites, digital pictures, or even scanned maps. Raster data incorporate the use of grid cell data structure where the geographic area is divided into cells identified by row and column. Each cell contains a value representing information, such as temperature. Data stored in raster format represents real world phenomena like Thematic data, continuous data and pictures.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation(SAARC) is the regional organization and geological union of states in South Asia. SAARC was founded in Dhaka on 8 December 1985. The main objectives of SAARC are to place regional cooperation on a firm foundation, accelerate the pace of social and economic development of the countries, and further the cause of peace, progress and stability on the region. There are 8 member countries in SAARC- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Ecotone are areas of steep transition between ecological communities, ecosystems, or ecological regions along an environmental gradient. In simple words, ecotone is an area that acts as a boundary or a transition between two ecosystems. Researcher argue that ecotones deserve high conservation investment, because they are often small in size and relatively rich in biodiversity, their conservation will be cost effective. They are rich in biodiversity because of inter-mingling of species of both the adjacent ecosystem. For example: an area of marshland between a river and its riverbank.

Cloudburst is a sudden, very heavy rainfall, usually local in nature and brief in duration. Cloudbursts occur when moisture rich air travels up in mountainous regions, forming a vertical column of clouds. These columns usually cause rain, thunder and lightning. Meteorological hazards occur as a result of processes in the atmosphere (Ahrens and Samson 2011). It is mainly caused by weather factors such as precipitation, temperature, wind speed and turbidity. These cause some weather related events such on floods, draughts, landslides, tides, sea level rise, wind, etc.

The Thornthwaite Climate Classification system created by American climatologist Charles Warren Thornwaite in 1931 and modified in 1948. It is a way of categorizing the world's climates. Like Koppen, Thornthwaite also considered natural vegetation of a region as the indicator of climate of that region.
Precipitation effectiveness and thermal efficiency are the basis of Thornwaite's classification of classmates.

A hypsometric curve is a graph that shows the proportion of land area that exists at various elevations by plotting relative area against relative height. Hypsometric curves are commonly used in limnology to represent the relationship between lake surface area and depth and calculate total lake volume.

The sex ratio in the country has shown a growth from 933 females in 2001 to 943 females in 2011 for every 1000 males.
There has been a 4% increase in urbanization in the last decade. The literacy rate went up from 64.83% in 2001 to 74.04% in 2011.

Mount St. Helens is the name given to the volcanic peak in 1972 by seafarer and explorer Captain George Vancouver of The British Royal Navy. It is the most active volcano and is most likely of the contiguous U.S. volcanoes to erupt in future. Mount St. Helens is located in Washington State in the U.S.

A Lorenz curve is a graphical representation of the distribution of income and wealth within a population. It shows percentiles of the population against cumulative income or wealth of people at or below the percentile. This curve is widely used to measure inequality across a population.
Inequality increases as the curve moves away from line of equality.
It is measured by calculating value of Gini-coefficient