NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 114 of 150

Correct — B, Purga. Purga is the name given to the buran when it blows across the tundra. The buran is the wind of eastern Asia — Siberia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang — and it changes character with the season: hot, dry and dust-raising in summer, and bitterly cold in winter, when it is often accompanied by driving snow. It is a cold-air wind by reputation because the winter form is the one that matters, blowing out from the enormous high-pressure cell that builds over Siberia in the cold months. That anticyclone is the same one whose retreat in spring helps set up the seasonal reversal of pressure over Asia.

• (a)Bora — The bora is a cold north-easterly that blows from eastern Europe down onto north-eastern Italy and the north-western Balkans, that is to say on to the Adriatic coast. Cold, yes — but Mediterranean Europe, not Siberia.
• (c)Mistral — The mistral is the cold northerly that funnels down from central France and the Alps to the Mediterranean, most famously through the Rhone valley. It is the standard French entry in every local-wind table and belongs nowhere near Asia.
• (d)Blizzard — A blizzard is a general weather event — a severe snowstorm with strong wind and low visibility — and not a named local wind of a particular region. It does not appear in the standard lists of local winds at all, which is exactly why it is placed here as the plausible-sounding decoy.

Local winds are named regional flows produced by the interaction of pressure systems with terrain. They divide roughly into warm descending winds, such as the chinook of the Rockies, the foehn of the Alps, the zonda of Argentina and the loo of northern India, and cold outflowing winds, such as the mistral, the bora, the buran and the pampero. A third group are the hot, dust-carrying desert winds — the harmattan, the simoom, the sirocco and the khamsin.

The reliable way to prepare this topic is to build a table of wind, region and character, and then to test yourself in the direction the examiner will ask — given the region, name the wind. Note also that examiners plant a generic weather word among the proper names, as 'blizzard' is planted here; the giveaway is that a genuine local wind always has a home region attached to it. The buran is worth two extra lines of memory because it is the only one of the four that flips character with the season, and because Siberia's winter high-pressure cell is the same feature that Indian geography syllabuses meet under the monsoon chapter, where its build-up and collapse help explain the seasonal reversal of winds over Asia. Beyond the exam, the winter buran is a genuine hazard of the steppe, capable of stripping visibility to nothing over open country.

• Purga is the name for the buran when it blows over the tundra.
• The buran blows across Siberia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang — hot and dust-raising in summer, bitterly cold and snow-laden in winter.
• The bora is a cold north-easterly of the Adriatic; the mistral is a cold northerly of southern France.
• A blizzard is a severe snowstorm rather than a named local wind of a specific region.

• Choosing a generic weather word such as blizzard when the question asks for a named local wind.
• Mixing the bora and the mistral, which are both cold European winds with adjacent territories.
• Assuming the buran is only a cold wind — in summer it is hot and dust-laden.

NDA sets a local-wind item in most papers, usually as a single wind-to-region question like this or as a four-pair matching list.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The cold north-easterly wind that blows onto the Adriatic coast of north-eastern Italy and the north-western Balkans is the

  • (a)Mistral
  • (b)Bora
  • (c)Sirocco
  • (d)Chinook

  Answer(b) Bora — the mistral is French, the sirocco is a hot southerly from North Africa, and the chinook belongs to the Rockies.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs of local wind and region is NOT correctly matched?

  • (a)Mistral : France
  • (b)Chinook : Rocky Mountains
  • (c)Harmattan : West Africa
  • (d)Buran : Brazil

  Answer(d) Buran : Brazil — the buran is a wind of Siberia and Central Asia; Brazil's cold southerly is the pampero.