Climates of India

About this chapter

Climates of India is Chapter 3 of Class 7 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Part 1, the Geography theme. It opens by separating three ideas often confused in daily talk — weather (day-to-day, like a hot afternoon), seasons (the recurring vasanta-grishma-varsha-sharad-hemanta-shishir cycle of six ritus) and climate (the long-term, several-decade pattern of a region). It then surveys the seven climate types found in India — alpine in the high Himalayas, temperate in lower hill stations, subtropical in the northern plains, arid in the Thar, tropical wet on the western coast, semi-arid on the Deccan plateau, and tropical with wet-dry monsoon cycle in eastern India and the southern peninsula. Five climate-determining factors are introduced — latitude, altitude, proximity to the sea, winds and topography — followed by the southwest and northeast monsoons, Mawsynram's 11,000 mm rainfall record, the climate-society link (festivals, monsoon failure, NDRF), four climate-related disasters (cyclones, floods, landslides, forest fires) and finally climate change, the greenhouse effect and mitigation. CTET Paper 2 SST tests this chapter through factor-effect matching, Mumbai-vs-Nagpur and Ooty-vs-Coimbatore contrast items, monsoon direction questions and disaster-state mapping. The four tests — Practice 15, Quiz 15, Hard 15, Mastery 30 — cover all six topic clusters at CTET depth.