Strait of Hormuz connects -

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, The Persian Gulf to Gulf of Oman. The Strait of Hormuz is the single sea outlet of the Persian Gulf: Iran holds the northern shore, while the southern shore is Oman's Musandam Peninsula, with a small stretch belonging to the UAE. At its narrowest the strait is only 39 km (24 miles, 21 nautical miles) across. Because the navigable channel is so tight, traffic runs on an International Maritime Organization Traffic Separation Scheme — an inbound lane and an outbound lane, each 2 nautical miles (3.7 km) wide, kept apart by a median strip of the same width — and those lanes lie inside Omani territorial waters, which is why the strait is a legal as well as a physical chokepoint. The volumes involved are the reason it is in the news at all: about 21 million barrels of oil a day passed through it in 2018, and across 2023–25 it carried roughly 25 per cent of seaborne oil trade, making it the world's most important oil chokepoint. Geographically the chain reads Persian Gulf → Strait of Hormuz → Gulf of Oman → Arabian Sea → Indian Ocean, and it matters that the Gulf has no second exit: every cargo loaded in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar or the UAE must sail out through Hormuz. That absence of an alternative is precisely why any threat to close the strait moves world crude prices within hours, and why the option pairs it with the Gulf of Oman rather than with any open ocean — the Gulf of Oman is the body of water immediately outside it, before the Arabian Sea widens out.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) That is Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait at the southern end of the Red Sea between Djibouti and Eritrea on the African side and Yemen on the Arabian side. It tempts because it is the *other* great chokepoint of the same region and is discussed in the same breath as Hormuz whenever shipping is disrupted — but it is a Red Sea feature, not a Persian Gulf one.  (c) The statement is loosely true of the Red Sea — it does reach the Indian Ocean — but the link is made by Bab-el-Mandeb and then the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, not by Hormuz. This option catches candidates who know only that Hormuz opens 'towards the Indian Ocean' and never fixed which enclosed sea sits at the other end of it.  (d) That is the Suez Canal — and it is not a strait at all but a man-made, lock-free, sea-level canal 193.30 km long across the Isthmus of Suez, opened on 17 November 1869. The option is designed for candidates who file all four Middle Eastern waterways under one heading; the first check on any such question is whether the thing named is a natural strait or a dug canal.

Concept: A strait is a narrow natural channel of water that joins two larger water bodies and, in doing so, separates two land masses — the exact mirror image of an isthmus, which is a narrow neck of land joining two land masses and separating two water bodies. Where nature provided no strait, states have dug a canal instead: Suez (1869) across the Isthmus of Suez and Panama (1914) across the Isthmus of Panama. Straits that carry a large share of world trade through a very small cross-section are called chokepoints, and a short list covers most of them: Hormuz (Persian Gulf–Gulf of Oman), Bab-el-Mandeb (Red Sea–Gulf of Aden), Malacca (Andaman Sea–South China Sea), the Turkish Straits of Bosporus and Dardanelles (Black Sea–Mediterranean), the Danish Straits, and the two great artificial ones, Suez and Panama. The Persian Gulf is a shallow, almost land-locked arm of the Arabian Sea bordered by Iran and by Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman; because Hormuz is its only opening, the strait converts a regional waterway into a global one.

State PCS 2025 Q102 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q102 — Geography PYQ with Answer