Q 01/05

Bombay duck, a pungent sun-dried delicacy from India's Arabian Sea coast, is actually what kind of animal?

A) A seabird

B) A fish

C) A sea snail

D) A crab

Answer · why

B) A fish

A fish, not a bird: Bombay duck is a species of lizardfish, and the odd name has been turning up in print since at least 1815.

Q 02/05

Which river is the largest to flow into the Arabian Sea?

A) Ganges

B) Narmada

C) Indus

D) Godavari

Answer · why

C) Indus

Indus is the root of the word India, though the river's lower course and its large delta now lie in Pakistan.

Q 03/05

Which Portuguese explorer crossed the Arabian Sea to Calicut in 1498, opening a sea route from Europe to India?

A) Vasco da Gama

B) Ferdinand Magellan

C) Bartolomeu Dias

D) Pedro Cabral

Answer · why

A) Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama made the crossing from Malindi in under a month, guided by a Gujarati pilot who knew the monsoon winds.

Q 04/05

The Arabian Sea holds one of the world's largest 'dead zones', a deep layer of water almost empty of which gas?

A) Nitrogen

B) Methane

C) Hydrogen

D) Oxygen

Answer · why

D) Oxygen

Oxygen is so scarce in this layer that standard instruments sometimes cannot detect any at all. The zone is one of the three largest on Earth, and the...

Q 05/05

Unlike other humpbacks, the whales of the Arabian Sea, isolated for 70,000 years, never do what?

A) Sing songs

B) Migrate

C) Breach

D) Dive deep

Answer · why

B) Migrate

Migrate is what other humpbacks do between cold feeding grounds and warm breeding grounds. This small group feeds and breeds in the same waters, mainl...