Consider the following pairs : Place of Pilgrimage: Location 1) Srisailam : Nallamala Hills 2) Omkareshwar : Satmala Hills 3) Pushkar : Mahadeo Hills Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched?

The correct answer is A (1 only). Only the first pair is correctly matched.

• Pair 1 is correct. Srisailam, the Jyotirlinga and Shakti Peetha town on the Krishna river, lies in the Nallamala Hills of Andhra Pradesh.
• Pair 2 is wrong. Omkareshwar, a Jyotirlinga on an island in the Narmada, sits in the Vindhyan range, not the Satmala Hills. The Satmala range lies further south, in the Maharashtra and Telangana region.
• Pair 3 is wrong. Pushkar, the Brahma temple town near Ajmer, lies in the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan. The Mahadeo Hills are a part of the Satpura range in Madhya Pradesh.

The core concept is the geographical location of pilgrimage centres and the hill ranges around them. Such questions link to the physical geography of India (the Peninsular plateau, Vindhyan, Satpura and Aravalli systems) and to the rivers that shape pilgrimage geography.

Trap: Aspirants often pick B or D by assuming that a hill name sounding familiar near a pilgrimage site must be correct. Check the range against an atlas, not memory of the place name.