MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 16 of 100

Correct — option (4), ten. R.L. Singh's classification of 1971 divides India into ten climatic divisions, and the criteria on which it rests are worth carrying with the number, because they are what distinguish it from the other schemes a candidate meets: the temperature of the hottest month, the temperature of the coldest month, and average annual rainfall. That is a deliberately simple set of measurements, and it produces a division designed to be read alongside India's regional geography rather than to slot into a global scheme. The work in which it appears, India: A Regional Geography, was published by the National Geographical Society of India at Varanasi in 1971, and R.L. Singh is more usually described as a geographer than as a meteorologist, which is what the stem calls him — a small looseness in the printed question that changes nothing about the answer. This is a pure citation-recall item with no structure to exploit. Four consecutive whole numbers are offered, no two of them can both be true, and nothing in the stem can be reasoned from, so a candidate either carries the number or does not. That has a direct consequence for how the item should be handled in the hall. With two marks for a correct answer and a quarter of them deducted for a wrong one, guessing between four consecutive integers is a losing proposition across a paper, and the honest move on a question of this shape is to leave it unless the figure is genuinely remembered. The productive preparation is not to memorise every scheme's count but to attach one number and one criterion to each of the classifications the syllabus names, because the numbers are only distinguishable when the criteria are.

• (1)Seven — Not the figure attached to R.L. Singh's 1971 scheme. Seven is a number that floats around this topic because several textbook treatments of Indian climate present a small set of broad climatic types — the tropical rainy, the semi-arid and arid, the humid subtropical and the mountain climates, with their subdivisions — and a candidate who has revised a summary table of that kind may carry seven without an author attached to it. That is the specific hazard of this question type: the count belongs to a named scheme, and a number remembered without its author is worse than no number at all, because it feels like knowledge.
• (2)Eight — The strongest distractor, because eight is a real and heavily taught figure in this area — it is the number of climatic types the standard textbook treatment yields when Köppen's global scheme is applied to India, running from the monsoon types through the semi-arid and arid types to the cold humid and polar types of the mountains. A candidate who has revised Köppen carefully and R.L. Singh only in passing will reach for it. Keeping the two apart is the point: Köppen classifies by temperature, rainfall and vegetation within a worldwide framework, while R.L. Singh's divisions rest on the hottest and coldest month temperatures and annual rainfall and are built for India alone.
• (3)Nine — A filler value, and it is there for a structural reason worth understanding rather than resenting. When a setter wants to test whether a number has been memorised exactly, the surest method is to offer consecutive integers on either side of it, because that removes every route to the answer except recall — no approximation helps, no reasoning about India's geography helps, and a candidate who remembers 'about ten' is left with two live options and a coin toss. Recognising this shape early is the practical value of the question: consecutive-integer options are a signal to answer from memory or not at all.

Climatic classification is the attempt to reduce a continuum of weather into a manageable number of regions, and because there is no single natural way to do it, several rival schemes coexist and the syllabus expects them to be told apart by their criteria. Köppen's is the best known and the most widely taught: a global scheme that groups climates by temperature and rainfall and takes vegetation as the visible expression of both, using letter codes for the type, the rainfall regime and the temperature character, and the standard textbook treatment applies it to India as eight types. Thornthwaite's approach of the 1930s starts from the plant's point of view, working with the effectiveness of precipitation and evaporation rather than with raw totals. Blanford, in the nineteenth century, produced the first classification of India's climatic regions. Stamp and Kendrew each proposed divisions for India, and R.L. Singh's of 1971 is the one this question names, resting on the temperature of the hottest and coldest months together with average annual rainfall and dividing the country into ten. The differences between them are not merely academic: a scheme built for the world will place India's monsoon regime inside categories designed elsewhere, while a scheme built for India can take the monsoon as its organising fact.

Two lessons come out of an item like this. The first concerns the shape of the options. When a question offers consecutive integers — seven, eight, nine, ten — it has been designed to defeat approximation, and no amount of reasoning about India's geography will narrow the field. That is a signal to answer from memory or leave it, and on a paper deducting a quarter of the marks for an error, leaving it is a real decision rather than an admission of failure. The second concerns how to store this area. The numbers attached to rival classifications are only separable if each is stored with its author and its criterion; a bare 'eight' or 'ten' floating free will attach itself to whichever scheme the question names, which is precisely the error the distractor set here is fishing for. Note also that the stem calls R.L. Singh a meteorologist, while the 1971 work is a regional geography published by the National Geographical Society of India — a looseness in the printed question that a candidate should read past rather than treat as a signal that some other author is meant.

• R.L. Singh's classification of 1971 divides India into ten climatic divisions, using the temperature of the hottest month, the temperature of the coldest month and average annual rainfall as its criteria.
• The classification appears in India: A Regional Geography, published by the National Geographical Society of India at Varanasi in 1971; R.L. Singh is generally described as a geographer rather than, as the stem has it, a meteorologist.
• Köppen's is the most widely taught scheme — a global classification by temperature and rainfall with vegetation as their visible expression, applied to India in the standard textbook treatment as eight types, which is why 'eight' is the strongest distractor on this question.
• Thornthwaite's classification of the 1930s works from the plant's point of view, using the effectiveness of precipitation against evaporation rather than raw rainfall totals, and is the main alternative approach to Köppen's.
• Blanford, in the nineteenth century, produced the first classification of India's climatic regions, and Stamp and Kendrew are the other names the syllabus attaches to Indian climatic division — each with a different criterion and therefore a different count.

• Carrying a number without the author attached to it: the counts for Köppen, R.L. Singh and the other schemes are only separable when each is stored with the criterion it rests on
• Reading consecutive-integer options as an invitation to approximate; the shape is chosen precisely to make approximation useless and to force exact recall
• Attempting a pure recall item on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer, when nothing in the stem can be reasoned from
• Being thrown by the stem's description of R.L. Singh as a meteorologist when he is usually described as a geographer — the year and the classification identify the scheme unambiguously

MPSC's geography block includes a steady supply of citation-recall questions of this kind — a named scholar, a year, and a count to be remembered — and it uses them because they are unambiguous to mark and impossible to reason around. Expect the same treatment for soil classifications, physiographic divisions, forest types and agro-climatic zones, where several rival schemes exist and each carries its own number. UPSC very rarely asks a bare count attached to an author; it asks instead about the criterion behind a classification or the characteristics of a particular region, so the same reading serves both examinations only if the criterion is learnt along with the number. The efficient revision artefact for this area is a single table with four columns — scheme, author, year, number of divisions — and a fifth column naming the criterion, which is the column UPSC examines and the one that makes the numbers memorable at all.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  R.L. Singh's classification of India's climatic regions rests principally on which of the following sets of criteria ?

  • (a)Vegetation cover and soil type
  • (b)Temperature of the hottest and coldest months together with average annual rainfall
  • (c)The effectiveness of precipitation measured against evaporation
  • (d)Elevation above sea level and distance from the sea

  Answer(b) Temperature of the hottest and coldest months together with average annual rainfall — the criteria on which the 1971 division of India into ten climatic regions is built. The effectiveness of precipitation against evaporation is Thornthwaite's approach, while vegetation enters Köppen's scheme as the visible expression of temperature and rainfall rather than as a criterion in its own right.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Köppen's classification as it is conventionally applied to India, the code Amw denotes which one of the following climatic types ?

  • (a)Hot desert climate
  • (b)Semi-arid steppe climate
  • (c)Monsoon type with a short dry season
  • (d)Polar type of the high mountains

  Answer(c) Monsoon type with a short dry season — the type covering the west coast and parts of the north-east in the standard treatment. BWhw denotes the hot desert climate of western Rajasthan, BShw the semi-arid steppe surrounding it, and E the polar type of the highest Himalayan zones, so the letters encode temperature and rainfall regime rather than region.