Nepal Engineering Council Registration Exam Watershed Planning & Management: practice questions

Question 1 · medium

For which situation is the topographic (surface) watershed most likely to be a poor boundary for a groundwater budget?

1. A steep granite catchment with thin soils
2. A small catchment on uniform clay with a shallow impermeable layer
3. A forested hill catchment with well-defined ridges
4. Karst limestone with sinkholes

Question 2 · medium

The general water balance equation for a watershed over a period is best written as:

1. Inflow − outflow = change in storage
2. Rainfall = runoff
3. Inflow + outflow = change in storage
4. Evapotranspiration = rainfall × runoff coefficient

Question 3 · medium

Zai (planting pits) and contour stone lines, widely used to rehabilitate degraded cropland in Burkina Faso and Niger, are examples of:

1. external (macro) catchment flood-water spreading
2. micro-catchment water harvesting within the field
3. storage of runoff in a reservoir for irrigation
4. sub-surface drainage of waterlogged fields

Question 4 · medium

A household of 5 people needs 20 litres per person per day of roof water for drinking and cooking through a dry season of 120 days. Assuming the tank is full at the start of the dry season, the storage required by the demand-side method is:

1. 1.2 m³
2. 12 m³
3. 120 m³
4. 0.6 m³

Question 5 · hard

In a watershed project, valley farmers support a grazing closure on the upper common land, but landless herders oppose it and continue grazing at night. Which planning response is most likely to make the closure work?

1. Negotiate with the herders so they get cut-and-carry fodder, a share of benefits such as water, and a say in the rules
2. Ask the police to enforce the closure and fine the herders
3. Abandon treatment of the common land and work only on private fields, where ownership is clear and nobody objects
4. Fence the area with barbed wire and let the valley farmers guard it at night in turns until the grass is established

Question 6 · medium

Which PRA tool is most suited to showing the months of food shortage, peak labour demand and out-migration in a village?

1. Social map
2. Transect walk
3. Venn diagram
4. Seasonal calendar

Question 7 · medium

The World Bank-supported watershed rehabilitation project on China's Loess Plateau, begun in the mid-1990s, is best known for combining:

1. large dams for hydropower with resettlement of all farmers (off the plateau)
2. conversion of all cropland to rice paddies
3. terracing of sloping farmland, check (silt-trapping) dams and revegetation with a ban on free grazing
4. sprinkler irrigation of the entire plateau from the Yellow River, with pumping stations on every major tributary

Question 8 · medium

In the United States, small watershed projects planned with local sponsors for flood prevention and conservation are funded under:

1. the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act of 1954 (Public Law 83-566)
2. the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 (TVA Act) only
3. the Clean Air Act
4. the Homestead Act

Question 9 · medium

'Fanya juu' terraces, promoted widely under Kenya's national soil and water conservation programme, are formed by:

1. throwing the soil downhill from a contour trench to form a bund below it, which is then planted with fodder grass
2. building stone walls across gullies
3. digging a trench along the contour and throwing the soil uphill to form a bund, which becomes a bench over time
4. planting single rows of trees along the field boundary

Question 10 · medium

Nepal's government department responsible for soil conservation and watershed management, established in 1974, works mainly through:

1. community user groups, building on the approach of community forestry
2. private contractors without community involvement
3. large river-basin authorities modelled on the TVA
4. the armed forces