CMDLearn

Learn

Class 6 Social Science: Locating Places on the Earth, 8 practice questions with answers

CMDLearn ·

These are 8 practice questions on the first chapter of the new NCERT Class 6 Social Science textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond, called Locating Places on the Earth. Each has a short answer and the textbook page it comes from. They cover what a map's scale means, cardinal and intermediate directions, kinds of maps, latitude and climate, how many minutes of time one degree of longitude makes and why time zones are 15° wide, why the International Date Line bends, hemispheres, what a minus sign on a time-zone map tells you, and why a country uses one standard time. For coordinates in maths, see our Class 9 coordinates guide. Try each question before you read the answer.

These questions are our own, drafted with AI help. Every fact was checked against the page it cites, and no question retells one of the chapter's activities, boxes or exercises; no practising teacher has reviewed them yet. If you find a mistake, please tell us.

What the chapter says you need

Facts from the NCERT textbook (Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Grade 6, Chapter 1, printed pages 7 to 26):

Maps

Question 1. A map of India is drawn to the scale 1 cm = 200 km, and a city map to the scale 1 cm = 500 m. (a) On which of the two maps does 1 cm of paper stand for the longer distance? (b) Why could nobody draw a useful map of a city at the scale 1 cm = 1 cm?

Answer: (a) the map of India; (b) the map would be as big as the city itself. (a) On the India map 1 cm is 200 km, which is 2,00,000 m; on the city map 1 cm is only 500 m. So 1 cm of the India map covers far more ground: it shows a much bigger area with far less detail. (b) A map is useful because its scale shrinks a huge place onto a small piece of paper. At 1 cm = 1 cm nothing is shrunk, so the map would be exactly as big as the city and could not be carried or read. (Both scales are ours, not the chapter's.) (Map scale, page 10.)

Question 2. (a) Name the four intermediate directions, and for each one say which two cardinal directions it lies between. (b) You face north and turn clockwise through a quarter turn. Which direction do you face now?

Answer: (a) northeast (between north and east), southeast (south and east), southwest (south and west) and northwest (north and west); (b) east. (a) The four cardinal directions are north, east, south and west. The intermediate directions lie halfway between two neighbouring cardinal ones, and each is named after those two: northeast (NE) between north and east, southeast (SE) between south and east, southwest (SW) between south and west, and northwest (NW) between north and west. (b) Moving clockwise from north, the cardinal directions come in the order north, east, south, west, so a quarter turn takes you to east. (Cardinal and intermediate directions, page 10.)

Question 3. Which kind of map, physical, political or thematic, is each? (a) A map of India showing its States and their capitals. (b) A map showing where the mountains and rivers of a region are. (c) A map of India showing only how much rain each region gets.

Answer: (a) political; (b) physical; (c) thematic. (a) Political maps show countries or states, their boundaries, cities and capitals. (b) Physical maps are mostly about nature's features: mountain ranges, rivers, seas. (c) A map made to show one specific kind of information, such as rainfall, is a thematic map. (Kinds of maps, page 9.)

Latitude and longitude

Question 4. Three places lie at about 3 degrees N, 45 degrees S and 80 degrees N. Using the chapter, describe the climate you would generally expect at each.

Answer: 3 degrees N, hot (torrid); 45 degrees S, moderate (temperate); 80 degrees N, cold (frigid). Places near the Equator are usually hot (torrid). Moving away from the Equator towards either pole, places become milder (temperate), and near the poles they are cold (frigid). 3 degrees N is near the Equator; 45 degrees S is about halfway to the South Pole; 80 degrees N is close to the North Pole. (Latitude and climate, page 14.)

Question 5. The Earth makes one full turn, 360°, every 24 hours. (a) How many degrees does it turn in one hour? (b) How many minutes does it take to turn through 1°? (c) The chapter's graph of time zones divides the Earth into zones 15° of longitude wide. Why 15°, and not some other width? (d) Why does the chapter link a place's longitude with the time there?

Answer: (a) 15°; (b) 4 minutes; (c) because 15° is how far the Earth turns in one hour; (d) because places at different longitudes face the Sun at different times. (a) 360 ÷ 24 = 15° an hour. (b) One hour is 60 minutes, and 60 ÷ 15 = 4 minutes for each degree. (c) The Earth turns through 15° every hour, so each 15° of longitude is one hour of local time. Zones 15° wide mean that each zone is one hour away from the next: a clock in the next zone to the east reads one hour later, and one in the next zone to the west one hour earlier. Any other width would give zones that differ by awkward fractions of an hour. (d) As the Earth turns, it is morning at some places, midday at others and night at others. Where a place is east or west, its longitude, decides when it faces the Sun, so knowing the longitude tells you its local time compared with Greenwich. (The 4 minutes is our step from the chapter's 15° an hour.) (Longitude and time, page 16; 15° per hour, page 20.)

Question 6. (a) Why do the time zones marked +12 and −12 meet each other at the International Date Line? (b) The chapter says the Date Line runs only approximately along 180° longitude. Why does it bend away from that line in places?

Answer: (a) they are the two zones furthest from Greenwich, ahead and behind, and both reach 180°; (b) so that no country is split into two different days. (a) Going east from Greenwich, standard times run ahead of GMT, up to +12 hours; going west, they run behind, down to −12 hours. Both directions arrive at the same meridian, 180°, from opposite sides, so the +12 and −12 zones touch there. Their clocks show the same hour, but they are a whole day apart, which is why the date changes when you cross the line. (b) If the line ran exactly along 180°, it could cut through a country, and one part would be on a different date from the other. So the Date Line deviates in places to keep each such country on one side, on a single date. (International Date Line, pages 22 and 23.)

Question 7. In which two hemispheres does each place lie? (a) A place at 20 degrees S, 45 degrees W. (b) A place at 35 degrees N, 139 degrees E.

Answer: (a) Southern and Western; (b) Northern and Eastern. The Equator divides the Earth into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and the Prime Meridian divides it into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. A latitude marked S lies south of the Equator, and a longitude marked W lies west of the Prime Meridian. (a) 20 degrees S and 45 degrees W: Southern and Western. (b) 35 degrees N and 139 degrees E: Northern and Eastern. (Hemispheres, page 17.)

Question 8. (a) On a world map of time zones, a country is marked −5. Is its clock ahead of Greenwich or behind it, and will its people see the Sun at its highest, around noon, before or after people in London? (b) Places in the east of India see sunrise much earlier than places in the west. Why does India still use one standard time instead of the local time of each place?

Answer: (a) behind Greenwich by 5 hours; it sees noon after London; (b) many local times in one country would be very inconvenient. (a) On the time-zone map, a negative number is the number of hours taken away from Greenwich Mean Time to get a country's standard time, so −5 means its clock is behind Greenwich by 5 hours. A country behind Greenwich lies to its west. The Earth turns from west to east, so places in the east face the Sun first; London meets midday first, and the −5 country sees its own noon later. (b) Every longitude has its own local time, so a wide country would have many different clock times at once. Trains, offices, schools, radio and television would all need different timetables for different towns. That is not convenient, so India, like most countries, uses one standard time for the whole country, based on a meridian passing through it: Indian Standard Time, 5 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. (Timetables and offices are our examples.) (Standard time, page 21.)

Practise more, and check your marks

Where CMDLearn fits

CMDLearn is building an AI tutor for Classes 1 to 10 that explains a step and checks the child's working, but leaves the writing to the child. It is still in development, and no child uses it yet. If you would like to hear when there is something to try, you can join the waitlist.

Sources

All opened and read on 2 November 2026. Page numbers are the printed page numbers of the textbook, which are also the PDF's page numbers for this chapter.

The facts are from the textbook pages above. The questions, answers and checks are our own. This guide is general information; follow your teacher and the textbook.