Plains and Rivers - Dams and River Middle Course

Vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts, definitions, and named entities related to dams, river engineering, and middle course river landforms.

Dam

A man-made wall built across a river to control water flow.

Hard Engineering

A river management approach that involves building artificial structures, such as dams, to control rivers.

Reservoir

An artificial lake created behind a dam wall that stores water and releases it in a controlled manner from its channels.

Tarbela Dam

The largest Earth-filled dam in the world, located in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; it stands $143\,\text{metres}$ high and holds $14.3\,\text{billion cubic metres}$ of water in its reservoir.

Aswan High Dam

One of the world's largest embankment dams, constructed across the Nile in Aswan, Egypt, between 1960 and 1970 to control annual river floods.

Gullfoss

Also known as "Golden Falls", a waterfall located close to the rapids on the Hvítá river in Iceland.

Floodplain

A wide, flat area of land across which a river flows in its middle course.

Lateral Erosion

Sideways erosion occurring in the middle course of a river that widens and deepens the river channel.

Meander

A large bend or horseshoe-like loop formed in a river channel due to both erosion and deposition.

The Middle Course of a River

The section of a river where it flows across flat floodplains, carries higher water volume, and forms meanders through lateral erosion and deposition.

Agricultural Land in Pakistan

According to the World Bank, $47.09\%$ of land in Pakistan is agricultural land, though most of it relies on canals linked to dams for irrigation.