Consider the following mountains and arrange them in correct order from West to East by their location :
1. Karakoram
2. Pontic
3. Hindu Kush
4. Zagros
Select the correct answer from the codes given b

Question

Consider the following mountains and arrange them in correct order from West to East by their location :
1. Karakoram
2. Pontic
3. Hindu Kush
4. Zagros
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 2, 4, 3, 1, that is Pontic → Zagros → Hindu Kush → Karakoram. Walk east along the Alpine–Himalayan mountain belt from Anatolia and the order falls out. The PONTIC Mountains are the westernmost: they run for about a thousand kilometres along the southern shore of the Black Sea in northern Turkey, reaching west almost to the Sea of Marmara and north-east into Georgia, so their span is roughly 30° to 42° East. Next comes the ZAGROS, which begins in north-western Iran, takes in south-eastern Turkey and north-eastern Iraq, and runs 1,600 kilometres south-east along Iran's western flank to the Strait of Hormuz; the range as a whole is centred near 47° East. Further east again is the HINDU KUSH, an 800-kilometre chain reaching from central and eastern Afghanistan into north-western Pakistan and the far south-east of Tajikistan, centred at about 71° East. Easternmost is the KARAKORAM, which straddles Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, Ladakh in India and Xinjiang in China; K2, its summit and the second-highest mountain on Earth at 8,611 metres, stands near 76°30′ East. Pontic, Zagros, Hindu Kush, Karakoram is therefore 2, 4, 3, 1 — option (a). A useful sanity check on the two ends: Turkey is the western anchor of the whole arc and India–Pakistan–China the eastern one, and the Hindu Kush's eastern end physically merges into the Karakoram, so those two must be adjacent and in that order.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Starts correctly with the Pontic but then swaps the Zagros and the Hindu Kush. That would put the Hindu Kush, which lies in Afghanistan and Pakistan at about 71° East, to the WEST of the Zagros, which lies in Iran and Iraq at about 47° East — a jump of nearly twenty-five degrees of longitude in the wrong direction. The mistake usually comes from grouping the Zagros with 'the Middle East' and the Hindu Kush with 'Central Asia' without remembering that Iran sits between Iraq and Afghanistan.  (c) Gets the eastern half right but opens with the Zagros instead of the Pontic. Both ranges reach into Turkey, which is what makes this the most tempting wrong answer, but they occupy different corners of it: the Pontic runs along the northern, Black Sea coast and extends west almost to the Sea of Marmara, while the Zagros only clips the south-eastern corner of Turkey before running down Iran's western border. The Pontic's western end is therefore several hundred kilometres west of anything in the Zagros.  (d) Scrambled beyond repair. It places the Karakoram — the easternmost range in the set, on the Pakistan–India–China frontier — in second position, ahead of both the Pontic in Turkey and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. Only the Zagros ends up anywhere defensible, and even that is in the wrong slot.

Concept: All four ranges belong to one structure: the Alpine–Himalayan orogenic belt, the near-continuous chain of young fold mountains raised where the African, Arabian and Indian plates drove north into Eurasia and closed the Tethys Sea. Traced from west to east the belt runs Atlas → Pyrenees and Alps → Carpathians and Caucasus → Pontic and Taurus in Anatolia → Zagros and Elburz in Iran → Hindu Kush and Pamir → Karakoram → Himalaya. That single thread is why 'arrange these ranges from west to east' is answerable without memorising longitudes: you are being asked to recite one chain, and each range's country is the clue to its position on it.

State PCS 2024 Q76 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q76 — Geography PYQ with Answer