SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 17 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 23 of 98

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

The tropical cyclones in Australia are known as ________.

(a)hurricanes
(b)typhoons
(c)cyclones
(d)willy-willies

Answer

Why

Correct — D. In the regional-names table that Indian school geography uses, tropical cyclones over Australia are willy-willies, which is option (d).

One storm, four labels by basin:

Hurricane — the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific.
Typhoon — the western Pacific and the South China Sea.
Cyclone — the Indian Ocean.
Willy-willy — Australia.

The physics is identical everywhere. Only the regional name changes, and Australia's is the one asked for here.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
hurricanes — Hurricane is the North Atlantic and eastern Pacific label — the storms that strike the Caribbean and the United States coast. Wrong ocean for a question about Australia.
(b)
typhoons — Typhoon belongs to the western Pacific and the South China Sea, the storms that hit the Philippines, Japan and China. It is a Pacific label, not an Australian one.
(c)
cyclones — Cyclone is the generic name for the whole family, and in this regional-names table it is reserved for the Indian Ocean, meaning the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.

Concept

A tropical cyclone is a low-pressure system born over warm ocean water, with winds spiralling inward — anticlockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern.

It needs a sea surface at roughly 27 degrees Celsius or warmer, abundant moisture, weak vertical wind shear, and some Coriolis force — which is why none forms within a few degrees of the equator.

Its centre is the eye, calm and nearly cloud-free, ringed by the eye wall where the strongest winds and heaviest rain are found.

One honest caveat. In Australia itself these storms are simply called cyclones, and in local speech a 'willy-willy' is a small dust whirlwind rather than a tropical storm.

The willy-willies label for Australian tropical cyclones comes from the regional-names table printed in Indian school geography, and that table is what SSC is testing.

Key facts

The same storm is called a hurricane in the Atlantic, a typhoon in the western Pacific, a cyclone in the Indian Ocean and a willy-willy in Australia.
A tropical cyclone needs a sea-surface temperature of about 27 degrees Celsius or more to form.
Tropical cyclones do not form on the equator itself, because the Coriolis force there is zero.
The calm centre is called the eye, and the eye wall around it carries the strongest winds.

Study next

The conditions required for a tropical cyclone to form and to intensifyHow cyclones in the North Indian Ocean are named and which countries contribute namesThe difference between a tropical cyclone and a temperate or mid-latitude cyclone

Common traps

Choosing cyclone because it is the generic word, when the stem asks for the regional name used in Australia.
Swapping hurricane and typhoon between the Atlantic and the western Pacific.

SSC sets the regional-names table as a one-line fill-in-the-blank, and it can be entered from either side — the region given and the name blank, or the name given and the region blank.

Learn all four labels with their basins in one go, because any one of them can be the blank.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.