Match the pairs of Indian rivers and waterfalls on it :
River
(a) Sharawati
(b) Narmada
(c) Kaveri
(d) Ghatprabha
Waterfall
(i) Shibsamudram
(ii) Gokak
(iii) Jog
(iv) Kapildhara

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), which reads (a) - (iii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (i), (d) - (ii). Three of the four waterfalls in the second column are in Karnataka and one is in Madhya Pradesh, so the first move is to separate them. Kapildhara at (iv) is the odd one out: it is the fall by which the Narmada makes its first descent from its source at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh, and it belongs to no southern river, so the Narmada at (b) takes it. That single pairing removes two rows at once. Of the three Karnataka falls, the Sharavati at (a) — printed here as 'Sharawati' — forms Jog Falls at (iii) in Shivamogga district, a drop of about 253 metres that splits into four cascades named Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket. The Kaveri at (c) forms Shivanasamudra Falls at (i), printed here as 'Shibsamudram', in Mandya district: a vertical drop of about 91 metres in two branches, Gagana Chukki and Bhara Chukki, and the site of the hydroelectric power station established in 1902 to supply the Kolar Gold Fields, designed by K. Seshadri Iyer and M. Visvesvaraya. The Ghataprabha at (d), a tributary of the Krishna, forms Gokak Falls at (ii) in Belagavi district. That completes (a) - (iii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (i), (d) - (ii), the row printed at option (3). The stem itself is printed with broken grammar — 'Match the pairs of Indian rivers and waterfalls on it :' — and two of the names are misspelt, which changes nothing about the pairing.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This row gives the Narmada the Shivanasamudra falls and the Kaveri the Kapildhara falls, exchanging a Madhya Pradesh fall with a Karnataka one. Kapildhara is on the Narmada, close to its source at Amarkantak, and is the river's first drop; Shivanasamudra is on the Kaveri in Mandya district of Karnataka, a two-branched fall of about 91 metres whose 1902 power station was the one built to light the Kolar Gold Fields. Neither river runs anywhere near the other's fall — the Narmada flows west across central India to the Arabian Sea and the Kaveri east across the Deccan to the Bay of Bengal. This row also puts Jog on the Ghataprabha and Gokak on the Sharavati, so no pair in it survives.  (b) This row pairs the four items straight down the printed order — Sharavati with Shivanasamudra, Narmada with Gokak, Kaveri with Jog and Ghataprabha with Kapildhara — which is what a candidate produces when they read the two side-by-side lists as though the printing had already matched them. Every pair is wrong. The two that are most obviously so are the Narmada with Gokak, a fall on the Ghataprabha in Belagavi district of Karnataka, and the Ghataprabha with Kapildhara, which is on the Narmada near Amarkantak. In a matching question the columns sit side by side because the reader has to match them; the adjacency is typesetting and asserts nothing at all.  (d) This row gives the Sharavati the Kapildhara falls and the Narmada the Shivanasamudra falls, then puts Gokak on the Kaveri and Jog on the Ghataprabha. It is the row that survives longest for a candidate who knows only that three of the four falls are in Karnataka, because it keeps all three Karnataka names on southern rivers — but it distributes them wrongly, and it puts the one Madhya Pradesh fall on a Karnataka river. Jog is the fall that settles this: it is the great fall of the Sharavati in Shivamogga district, splitting into the four cascades called Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket, and any row that puts it on another river can be struck out at once.

Concept: A waterfall forms where a river crosses a sharp break in the gradient of its bed — the edge of a plateau, a fault scarp, a band of hard rock over soft, or a hanging valley. Peninsular India supplies all of these, which is why its waterfalls cluster where the rivers leave the Deccan plateau at the Western Ghats and where they cross the plateau's own scarps. The Sharavati falls 253 metres at Jog in Shivamogga district, splitting into the Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket cascades. The Kaveri falls about 91 metres at Shivanasamudra in Mandya district, in two branches called Gagana Chukki and Bhara Chukki, and the site carries a hydroelectric station established in 1902 and designed by K. Seshadri Iyer and M. Visvesvaraya to supply the Kolar Gold Fields — the first of its kind in Asia, and the origin of the power supply to Bengaluru and Mysuru. The Ghataprabha, a Krishna tributary, falls at Gokak in Belagavi district. In central India the Narmada, rising at Amarkantak, makes its first descent at Kapildhara and later cuts the Dhuandhar fall through the marble rocks near Jabalpur.

State PCS 2021 Q29 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q29 — Geography PYQ with Answer