BharatNotes Fundamentals of Physical Geography is Part 1 of NCERT's Class XI geography course: what geography studies, how the Earth formed and what lies inside it, how plates move and landforms are made and worn down, how the atmosphere is heated and circulates and gives rain, how the oceans are built and move, and how life is spread and conserved. The current rationalised book, Reprint 2026-27, has 14 chapters. It dropped two chapters of the older 16-chapter book, Minerals and Rocks and Life on Earth; these pages keep both, labelled "Retained chapter", because UPSC questions still draw on that material. Our page numbers therefore follow the older book, and each page says which NCERT chapter it follows. Every page prints NCERT's statement first and the dated scientific record beside it: NCERT's 13.7-billion-year universe against Planck's 13.787 billion, its warming figures against NASA's record for 2024 and 2025, its threat categories against the IUCN Red List's current ones.
For UPSC the book is the baseline of GS1's physical geography (geomorphology, climatology, oceanography, biogeography); GS3 draws on its climate-change and biodiversity chapters, and Prelims on its processes, terms and named phenomena every year.
The chapters
| Site page | NCERT chapter (Reprint 2026-27) | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Geography as a Discipline | Chapter 1 | The meaning of geography, areal differentiation, spatial and temporal synthesis, the systematic and regional approaches, and NCERT's tree of branches and allied disciplines |
| 2. Origin and Evolution of the Earth | Chapter 2 | The nebular hypothesis and its revision, the Big Bang, stars and planetesimals, the differentiation of the Earth, the evolution of the atmosphere and oceans, and the origin of life |
| 3. Interior of the Earth | Chapter 3 | Direct and indirect sources, earthquake waves and shadow zones, kinds and measurement of earthquakes, the crust, mantle and core, and volcanoes and intrusive landforms |
| 4. Distribution of Oceans and Continents | Chapter 4 | Continental drift and its evidence, sea-floor spreading, plate tectonics and plate boundaries, the forces that move plates, and the movement of the Indian plate |
| 5. Minerals and Rocks | Dropped in the rationalisation (the 2019-20 edition's Chapter 5), retained here | Elements of the crust, the physical properties of minerals, the major minerals, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, and the rock cycle |
| 6. Geomorphic Processes | Chapter 5 | Endogenic and exogenic processes, denudation, weathering, mass movements and landslides, erosion and deposition, and soil formation |
| 7. Landforms and their Evolution | Chapter 6 | Erosional and depositional landforms of running water, groundwater, glaciers, waves and currents, and wind, with NCERT's stages of landform development |
| 8. Composition and Structure of Atmosphere | Chapter 7 | The gases, water vapour and dust of the atmosphere and its five layers, with current greenhouse-gas data |
| 9. Solar Radiation, Heat Balance and Temperature | Chapter 8 | Insolation and its variation, how the atmosphere is heated and cooled, the heat budget, the controls of temperature, isotherms and inversion |
| 10. Atmospheric Circulation and Weather Systems | Chapter 9 | Pressure and the forces on wind, pressure belts and the general circulation, El Niño, local winds, air masses and fronts, cyclones, thunderstorms and tornadoes |
| 11. Water in the Atmosphere | Chapter 10 | Humidity, evaporation and condensation, dew, frost, fog, mist and clouds, the forms and types of precipitation, and the world distribution of rainfall |
| 12. World Climate and Climate Change | Chapter 11 | Koeppen's classification and the world's climate types, climate change in the past and its causes, and global warming with the current record |
| 13. Water (Oceans) | Chapter 12 | The hydrological cycle, the relief of the ocean floor, and the distribution of ocean temperature and salinity |
| 14. Movements of Ocean Water | Chapter 13 | Waves, tides and their kinds, the forces behind ocean currents, and the warm and cold currents and their effects |
| 15. Life on Earth | Dropped in the rationalisation (the 2019-20 edition's Chapter 15), retained here | Ecology and ecosystems, food chains and webs, NCERT's biomes, the biogeochemical cycles, and ecological balance |
| 16. Biodiversity and Conservation | Chapter 14 | Levels and importance of biodiversity, its loss, NCERT's and the IUCN's threat categories, hotspots, and in-situ and ex-situ conservation with India's protected areas |
Source: NCERT, Fundamentals of Physical Geography, Class XI, contents page, Reprint 2026-27 (kegy2ps.pdf).
What the current book no longer prints
The rationalisation also removed passages from the chapters it kept. Comparing the 2019-20 and 2026-27 texts:
- Geography as a Discipline: the section on physical geography and the natural sciences.
- Origin and Evolution of the Earth: the older theories (Chamberlain and Moulton, Jeans and Jeffreys), the whole section on the solar system with its planet table, and the geological time scale.
- Interior of the Earth: the densities of the crust, mantle and core, and the activity on locating an epicentre.
- Distribution of Oceans and Continents: the Fuji plate from the list of minor plates.
- World Climate and Climate Change: the Highland (H) group of Koeppen's scheme.
How to read the book for the exam
- Read the two geography books together. This book gives the processes; India: Physical Environment shows them at work in India's relief, rivers, monsoon, forests and hazards. A Mains answer on the monsoon, on Himalayan earthquakes or on coral bleaching needs both.
- Learn the mechanisms as chains. Prelims statements test a step in a process: why S waves leave a shadow zone, why the troposphere cools with height, why the Coriolis force deflects winds. Several of the pages' figures draw these chains.
- Keep NCERT's figures and the current ones side by side. NCERT's numbers come from the science of its own writing; the pages give the current measurement with its date and source, so either can be answered.
- Date the live items. Global temperature (NASA's annual anomaly of 1.29°C for 2024 and 1.19°C for 2025 against 1951-1980), greenhouse-gas concentrations, the carbon budget, the Red List categories and India's protected-area and Ramsar counts: each page gives the figure as of October 2026 and names the record.
Sources used across the book
- NCERT, Fundamentals of Physical Geography, Reprint 2026-27 (whole-book zip) and the 2019-20 edition for the two dropped chapters and passages.
- Scientific records with their own dates: NASA's GISTEMP, NOAA, the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, the Global Carbon Budget, the United States Geological Survey and the IUCN Red List.
- Government of India records: the India Meteorological Department, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the Wildlife Institute of India, the Zoological Survey of India, the Ministry of Earth Sciences, and Press Information Bureau releases.
