Following are the mountain ranges of India
1. Garo Hills
2. Nandadevi
3. Kamet
4. K2
Which of the following is their correct sequence from east to west ?

Question

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Correct — C, 1 2 3 4. East to west is settled by longitude alone, so the task is to place four features on a line of degrees east. The Garo Hills, in western Meghalaya, lie at about 90 degrees 20 minutes east — more than ten degrees east of anything else on the list, and therefore first in any east-to-west reading. K2, in the Karakoram, stands at 76 degrees 30 minutes 48 seconds east, the most westerly of the four, and therefore last. Between them sit two peaks that are both in the Garhwal Himalaya, both in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, and only a short distance apart — which is where the question is actually decided. Nanda Devi is at 79 degrees 58 minutes 15 seconds east and Kamet at 79 degrees 35 minutes 30 seconds east, so Kamet lies about twenty-three minutes of longitude, roughly a third of a degree, further west. Going east to west, Nanda Devi comes before Kamet. Assembling the four gives Garo Hills at 90.33 degrees east, Nanda Devi at 79.97, Kamet at 79.59 and K2 at 76.51, which is exactly the printed order 1, 2, 3, 4. Two features of the stem are worth noticing even though neither changes the answer. It calls all four 'mountain ranges of India', but only the Garo Hills are a range — the other three are individual peaks. And K2 stands in the Karakoram in territory that India claims as part of Jammu and Kashmir and that is presently under Pakistani administration, with a further portion claimed by China, which is why it appears on an Indian paper's list of Indian mountains.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 4 3 1 2 — the option built for a candidate who reads the direction backwards. It opens with K2, which is the most westerly of the four and so must come last in an east-to-west list, not first. Reversing the direction is the single commonest error on sequence questions, and the option is designed to reward exactly that mistake — though it does not even hold together as a clean reversal, since it then places the Garo Hills third rather than first.  (b) 3 4 2 1 — begins with Kamet and puts K2 second, which places two western Himalayan points ahead of the Garo Hills entirely. The Garo Hills are more than ten degrees of longitude east of every other item on the list, a gap of over a thousand kilometres, so no correct east-to-west ordering can have them anywhere but at the head.  (d) 2 1 4 3 — starts with Nanda Devi and demotes the Garo Hills to second, which fails on the same ground as option (b). It also ends by putting Kamet after K2, reversing the western pair. Two independent errors in one option, and the first of them is visible without knowing a single coordinate.

Concept: India spans from about 68 degrees 7 minutes east to 97 degrees 25 minutes east, and an east-to-west question is asking you to place named features on that span. The mountains involved here belong to two entirely different systems, which is worth holding because it explains the enormous gap in the middle of the list. The Himalaya and the Karakoram form the young folded mountain wall along the northern edge of the country, arcing from the Indus gorge in the west to the Brahmaputra gorge in the east; the Karakoram carries K2 at 8,611 metres, the second-highest mountain in the world, while the Garhwal section of the Himalaya in Uttarakhand carries Nanda Devi at about 7,816 metres — the second-highest mountain in India after Kangchenjunga and the highest lying entirely within the country — and Kamet at 7,756 metres, the twenty-ninth highest in the world. The Garo Hills are not part of that system at all. Together with the Khasi and Jaintia Hills they make up the Meghalaya plateau, a detached fragment of the ancient peninsular block that was separated from the main shield, and their highest point, Nokrek, reaches only 1,412 metres. Low hills of old rock in the east, very high young peaks in the west.

State PCS 2024 Q18 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q18 — Geography PYQ with Answer