Which of the following is not associated with Australia Continent ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Salwin Mountain. Start with what is certain. Two of the four options are unmistakably Australian: the Nullarbor Plain, the flat, almost treeless arid country of southern Australia along the Great Australian Bight, spanning South Australia and Western Australia and forming the world's largest single exposure of limestone bedrock; and Lake Eyre, now Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, the great endorheic salt lake of Far North South Australia, usually dry, up to about 9,500 sq km when it fills, and containing the lowest natural point in Australia at roughly 15 m below sea level. That leaves two options which, as printed in English, differ by a single letter — and this is the question where the हिन्दी column earns its place. On the facing हिन्दी page the two are not near-identical at all: option (A) is printed साल्विन and option (B) सेल्विन. साल्विन is Salween — the great Asian river, 3,289 km long, which rises in Tibet, runs south through Yunnan as the Nu Jiang, crosses Myanmar's Shan, Karenni, Karen and Mon states, forms part of the Myanmar–Thailand border and reaches the sea at Mawlamyine. It has nothing whatever to do with Australia. सेल्विन is Selwyn, and the Selwyn Range is rugged highland country in Queensland — Australian. So the odd one out is (a). Devanagari writes the vowel that the Latin transliteration collapses, which is why the हिन्दी text is the more precise one here.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This is the Selwyn of the हिन्दी column — सेल्विन — and Selwyn is Australian: the Selwyn Range is a belt of rugged highlands in Queensland. In the English column it sits one letter away from option (a), which is exactly what makes this question hard; a candidate reading only the English has no way to tell which of the two spellings is the Asian name and which the Australian one.  (c) The Nullarbor Plain is one of the defining features of the Australian interior — a vast, almost treeless limestone platform on the Great Australian Bight, crossed by the Eyre Highway and by the longest straight stretch of railway in the world. Its very name is from the Latin for 'no tree'. It is Australian beyond dispute, so it cannot be the answer.  (d) Lake Eyre — officially Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre — lies in the far north of South Australia and is Australia's largest lake when it fills, which happens only in years of heavy flooding upstream in the Channel Country. It holds the continent's lowest natural point, about 15 m below sea level. Again unambiguously Australian, and named after the explorer Edward John Eyre, whose name is also on the Eyre Peninsula and the Eyre Highway.

Concept: This is an odd-one-out question in world physical geography, and it is decided by the general principle that a name belongs to a region. Australia's classic physical features form a short and very examinable list: the Great Dividing Range along the east, the Nullarbor Plain and the Great Australian Bight in the south, the Great Victoria, Simpson and Gibson deserts in the interior, Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens in the endorheic basins, the Murray–Darling as the one major river system, Uluru in the Northern Territory and the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland. Against that list, an Asian river's name stands out at once — provided you can read the name correctly. The second, and more transferable, lesson is procedural rather than geographical: this paper is a facing-page bilingual booklet, English on one page and हिन्दी on the page opposite, and the two columns are independent renderings of the same item. When one column is ambiguous, the other is evidence, and reading it costs nothing.

State PCS 2025 Q109 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q109 — Geography PYQ with Answer