Arrange the following ranges from North to South in sequence 1. Ladakh 2.…

Concept

Along the Jammu & Kashmir / Ladakh belt of the western Himalaya, several ranges run roughly parallel to one another, one behind the other, from the Tibetan Plateau in the north down towards the Kashmir Valley and the plains in the south. Each range's position — which one lies north of which — is fixed by the valleys and plateaus it separates, not by its height or length.

Application

Reading these four ranges strictly from north to south:

1. Karakoram Range - the northernmost of the four, running along the India-China frontier and feeding glaciers such as the Siachen.

2. Ladakh Range - immediately south of the Karakoram, separating the Indus valley from the Shyok valley.

3. Zanskar Range - further south again, dividing the Zanskar valley from the Indus valley and forming the northern wall of the Kashmir Valley.

4. Pir Panjal Range - the southernmost of the four, forming the southern rim of the Kashmir Valley before the land drops towards the Shivaliks and the plains.

Numbering the ranges as given in the stem (1. Ladakh, 2. Karakoram, 3. Pir Panjal, 4. Zanskar), the north-to-south order Karakoram, Ladakh, Zanskar, Pir Panjal is written using those codes as 2, 1, 4, 3.

Cross-check

This matches the physiography of the western Himalaya as given in the NCERT Class XI geography textbook, and is corroborated independently by the Encyclopaedia Britannica entries on the Ladakh, Zanskar and Pir Panjal ranges, which fix Ladakh south of the Karakoram, Zanskar south of Ladakh, and the Pir Panjal as the southernmost of the four.

• 1, 3, 2, 4 stays close to the stem's own listing order, only swapping the middle two positions, instead of reordering the ranges by their actual latitude.

• 3, 4, 1, 2 is the stem's listing order rotated by two places (the last two items moved to the front) - again a rearrangement of the list, not a reflection of the real north-south layout.

• "More than one of the above" cannot hold: the physical layout of these four ranges is a single fixed fact, so exactly one numbered sequence can match it.

• "None of the above" cannot hold either, since one of the three explicit numbered sequences does match the real layout.