Which of the following pairs is/are NOT correctly matched ?
(Tribe) - (Habitat)
1. Bushman - Kalahari Desert
2. Eskimo - Northern Canada
3. Pygmy - Congo Basin
4. Masai - West Africa
Select the correc

Question

Which of the following pairs is/are NOT correctly matched ?
(Tribe) - (Habitat)
1. Bushman - Kalahari Desert
2. Eskimo - Northern Canada
3. Pygmy - Congo Basin
4. Masai - West Africa
Select the correct answer from the code given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 4. The question asks which pairs are NOT correctly matched, and only the fourth fails. The Masai (Maasai) are a Nilotic cattle-keeping people of East Africa — the semi-arid savanna and Rift Valley grasslands of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, the country around the Maasai Mara and the Serengeti — and not of West Africa. The other three pairs are textbook-correct. The Bushmen, properly the San, are the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, spread across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The Eskimo peoples, the Inuit and Yupik, live across the Arctic including northern Canada, as well as Greenland, Alaska and eastern Siberia. The Pygmy peoples — the Mbuti, Aka and Twa among them — inhabit the equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin. One mismatch, and it is pair 4, so the code is 'Only 4'.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Exactly inverted. It rejects the three sound pairs and keeps the faulty one. Bushman-Kalahari Desert, Eskimo-Northern Canada and Pygmy-Congo Basin are all standard pairings; this option is what a candidate marks after reading the question as 'which pairs ARE correctly matched'.  (b) Pair 4 does fail, but pair 3 does not. The Pygmy peoples are the classic rainforest hunter-gatherers of the Congo Basin — a pairing UPPSC itself used, and treated as correct, in its 2019 Paper-I.  (d) The Bushmen or San are among the most-documented desert hunter-gatherers in the world and the Kalahari is their homeland; the pair is correct. This option also leaves the genuinely faulty Masai-West Africa pairing untouched.

Concept: Questions of this kind test a small standard roster from world human geography in which each community is keyed to one climatic region: Bushman or San to the hot desert of the Kalahari, Bedouin to the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara fringe, Pygmy to the equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin, Semang to the rainforest of Malaysia, Eskimo or Inuit and the Lapps or Sami to the tundra, Masai to the tropical savanna of East Africa, and Kirghiz to the temperate grassland and steppe of Central Asia. The livelihood follows from the environment — hunting and gathering in desert and rainforest, cattle herding on savanna and steppe, hunting and fishing on the tundra — so getting the region right usually gets the way of life right too.

State PCS 2025 Q19 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q19 — Geography PYQ with Answer