UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 41 of 150

Correct — D, Lake Manzala – Lake Timsah – Great Bitter Lake – Little Bitter Lake. This is a spatial (north-to-south) sequence, not a chronological one: walk down the Suez Canal from its Mediterranean mouth at Port Said to its Red Sea mouth at Suez and you cross the water bodies in exactly this order. Lake Manzala is the brackish coastal lagoon on the Nile Delta's Mediterranean edge, through which the canal's northernmost stretch was cut; Lake Timsah ('Crocodile Lake') sits at Ismailia, roughly midway; then come the two salt lakes of the southern half — the Great Bitter Lake, followed by the smaller Little Bitter Lake — after which the canal reaches Suez on the Gulf of Suez.

• (a)Lake Timsah – Little Bitter Lake – Great Bitter Lake – Lake Manzala — It banishes Lake Manzala — a Mediterranean coastal lagoon that can only be at the canal's northern end — to the southern end, and it also inverts the Bitter Lakes (Great lies north of Little). This option is in fact option (c) read backwards.
• (b)Great Bitter Lake – Little Bitter Lake – Lake Timsah – Lake Manzala — This is essentially the south-to-north listing — it starts with the southern salt lakes and ends with the northern lagoon, the opposite of what was asked — and even as a south-to-north list it is wrong, because the Little Bitter Lake (not the Great) is the southernmost of the pair.
• (c)Lake Manzala – Great Bitter Lake – Little Bitter Lake – Lake Timsah — It opens correctly with Lake Manzala but drops Lake Timsah to the far south. Timsah lies at Ismailia, about halfway along the canal and clearly north of both Bitter Lakes — this is the classic 'right start, wrong middle' trap.

The Suez Canal is a sea-level, lock-free ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, about 193 km long, opened on 17 November 1869. It needs no locks because the two seas stand at effectively the same level. Its builders deliberately threaded the route through a chain of natural lagoons and salt depressions already present in the isthmus, which cut down the volume of excavation — so the 'lakes of the Suez Canal' are not artificial reservoirs but pre-existing water bodies strung along the line.

Do not memorise the four names as a list; anchor them to the two ends. Port Said and the Mediterranean are NORTH, Suez and the Red Sea are SOUTH. Manzala is a Mediterranean delta lagoon, so it must be first. 'Bitter' means saline — the Bitter Lakes are inland salt basins near the Red Sea end, so they must be last, and Great comes before Little. That leaves Timsah in the middle, which is where Ismailia — the canal's mid-point administrative town — actually is. Options (a) and (b) are the sequence run backwards; (c) keeps the correct first name to make the reversal harder to spot.

• Suez Canal: ~193 km, Port Said (Mediterranean, north) to Suez/Port Tewfik (Gulf of Suez, south); a sea-level canal with no locks; opened 17 November 1869 under Ferdinand de Lesseps.
• North-to-south water bodies along the route: Lake Manzala → Lake Timsah (at Ismailia) → Great Bitter Lake → Little Bitter Lake.
• The Great Bitter Lake is the widest stretch of the waterway and has long been used as an anchorage and passing place for convoys of ships.
• The canal was nationalised by Egypt in 1956; a 35-km parallel channel plus deepening of existing stretches — the 'New Suez Canal' — opened in August 2015 to allow two-way traffic over part of the route.
• By linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea it removes the need for the long voyage round the Cape of Good Hope on the Europe–Asia route.

• Reading the option list in the direction you already know it. Exams flip north–south to south–north; always re-read which direction is asked before you match.
• Assuming 'Great' comes after 'Little' because that is how sizes usually escalate in a list — here the Great Bitter Lake is the northern one of the pair.
• Confusing Port Said (northern, Mediterranean terminus) with the town of Suez (southern, Red Sea terminus).

Both UPPSC and UPSC like ordering questions on linear features — canal lakes, hills, rivers, straits — where the whole marks turn on the stated direction (north→south, west→east, upstream→downstream) rather than on the names themselves.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Suez Canal, unlike the Panama Canal, requires no locks. The main reason is that

  • (a)the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea are at practically the same level
  • (b)the canal is much shorter than the Panama Canal
  • (c)the canal passes through a chain of freshwater lakes
  • (d)tidal range is negligible in both the seas it connects

  Answer(a) the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea are at practically the same level — so a straight sea-level cut suffices, whereas Panama must lift ships over a continental divide via Gatun Lake.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The city of Ismailia, roughly midway along the Suez Canal, stands on the shore of

  • (a)Lake Manzala
  • (b)Lake Timsah
  • (c)the Great Bitter Lake
  • (d)the Little Bitter Lake

  Answer(b) Lake Timsah — the 'Crocodile Lake' at the canal's mid-point; Manzala is the northern coastal lagoon and the Bitter Lakes lie to the south.