Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The interior part of Australia is desert and semi-desert.
Reason (R) : Northern Australia

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The interior part of Australia is desert and semi-desert.
Reason (R) : Northern Australia is situated in the temperate zone.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, (A) is true, but (R) is false. The Assertion is sound: the Australian interior — the 'outback' — is dominated by the Great Victoria, Great Sandy, Tanami, Gibson and Simpson deserts, and roughly seventy per cent of the continent is classed as arid or semi-arid. The Reason is false on its geography: northern Australia is not in the temperate zone at all. The Tropic of Capricorn (about 23.5 degrees South) runs right across the middle of the continent, passing near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory and Rockhampton in Queensland, so everything north of that line — Darwin, the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, Cape York — lies inside the tropical (torrid) zone and has a monsoonal wet-and-dry savanna climate. Australia's temperate belt is its SOUTH: Victoria, Tasmania, and the southern margins of Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales. With the Assertion true and the Reason false, the answer is (b).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This accepts the Reason, and the Reason is the one wrong statement in the pair. It is the option chosen by a candidate who spots that the two statements do not connect but never checks the factual claim about the northern zone.  (c) It inverts the truth values completely. The desert interior is one of the least disputable facts in world regional geography, and the temperate-north claim is simply wrong — the Tropic of Capricorn crosses the continent well south of Darwin.  (d) Doubly wrong. The Reason is false, and even if one granted it, a statement about the NORTH could not explain the aridity of the INTERIOR. The genuine causes are the subtropical high-pressure belt sitting over the middle of the continent, the rain shadow of the Great Dividing Range, sheer distance from the sea across a 4,000 km-wide landmass, and the cold West Australian Current offshore.

Concept: Australia is the driest inhabited continent. The Tropic of Capricorn bisects it, so the interior lies under the descending limb of the Hadley cell — the subtropical high-pressure belt of stable, subsiding, drying air that produces every major tropical desert, from the Sahara and Kalahari to the Atacama. Three further factors deepen the aridity: the Great Dividing Range along the east coast intercepts the moisture-bearing south-east trades and casts a long rain shadow inland; the continent's great east-west extent leaves the centre far from any moisture source; and the cool West Australian Current chills the western coastal air, suppressing convection and rainfall.

State PCS 2025 Q85 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q85 — Geography PYQ with Answer