CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 27 of 120

Correct — C, Circular. Rural settlements are classified in several ways, and one of them is by the shape the built-up area takes on the ground. NCERT's treatment of human settlements lists linear, rectangular, circular, star-like, T-shaped, Y-shaped, cross-shaped and double villages, and it attaches each shape to the feature the village grew along. For the circular form it says plainly that circular villages develop around lakes and tanks, and that sometimes the village is planned so the central part stays open and is used to keep the animals safe from wild animals. The logic is simply that a settlement copies the outline of whatever it is clinging to. A lake or a tank is a closed curve, so houses that all want frontage on the water end up strung right round it, leaving the water — or an open central space — enclosed. That is a shape no road junction or straight route can produce.

• (a)Linear — The linear village follows something long and thin. NCERT locates it along a road, a railway line, a river, a canal, the edge of a valley or a levee — a line of houses following a line on the map, which a lake shore is not.
• (b)Cross-shaped — Cross-shaped or cruciform villages grow at cross-roads, where houses extend outward in all four directions from the meeting point. The controlling feature is a road intersection, not a body of water.
• (d)Square — There is no square pattern in the standard typology at all. The comparable form is the rectangular village of the plains and wide inter-montane valleys, where roads cut each other at right angles — and even that owes its shape to the road grid, not to a lake.

Rural settlements are classified on three separate axes, and candidates lose marks by mixing them. One axis is the setting — plain, plateau, coastal, forest or desert village. A second is compactness — clustered, semi-clustered, hamleted and dispersed. The third is form or shape, and that is the axis this question uses: linear, rectangular, circular, star-like, T-shaped, Y-shaped, cross-shaped and double villages. Each shape is a response to the site feature the village is organised around — a route, a junction, a valley edge or a water body.

Solve it by asking what geometry the controlling feature has. A road or a canal is a line, so a village on it is linear. A junction of two roads is a cross, so the village is cruciform; a junction of three gives the T-shape and a convergence of several gives the star. A lake or a village tank is a closed loop, so houses ring it and the pattern is circular. The pull is that every household wants access to the water, and the water is the same distance from any point on its own bank. One honest note about the source: this material sits in the Class 12 human-settlements chapter, which was dropped when NCERT rationalised its textbooks, so a candidate studying only the current edition will not find the typology there — CDS nevertheless asked from it in 2023, and older editions and standard geography texts still carry it.

• NCERT, on the circular form: 'Circular villages develop around lakes, tanks and sometimes the village is planned in such a way that the central part remains open and is used for keeping the animals to protect them from wild animals.'
• The linear form is defined as houses 'located along a road, railway line, river, canal edge of a valley or along a levee'.
• Cruciform settlements 'develop on the cross-roads and houses extend in all the four direction'; T-shaped ones develop at tri-junctions.
• The plains form is rectangular, not square: 'The roads are rectangular and cut each other at right angles.'
• Shape is only one of the classification axes; the others are the settlement's site and its degree of clustering or dispersion.

• Confusing the shape axis with the compactness axis; circular is a shape, clustered is a degree of clustering, and the two answer different questions.
• Looking for a square village. The typology offers rectangular for grid-planned plains villages, and nothing square.
• Assuming a lakeside village must be linear because the houses face the water; a shoreline is a closed curve, so the line closes on itself.

Almost always as a one-liner matching a settlement shape to the feature it forms around, or as a match-the-pattern-to-the-site list.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A rural settlement in which houses are strung out along a canal bank is best described as which one of the following forms?

  • (a)Circular
  • (b)Linear
  • (c)Star-like
  • (d)Rectangular

  Answer(b) Linear — the linear form develops along a road, railway line, river, canal, valley edge or levee, all of which are long and narrow features.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Star-like rural settlements typically develop at which one of the following sites?

  • (a)The bank of a large lake
  • (b)A point where several roads converge
  • (c)A narrow ridge crest
  • (d)The mouth of a river

  Answer(b) A point where several roads converge — houses build outward along each of the radiating roads, giving the settlement a star-shaped outline.