Which country ranks sixth just before India by area?

Correct answer: Australia

The governing concept is ranking countries by total geographical area. In the standard school-geography ordering of the world’s largest countries, Russia is first, followed by Canada, China, the United States, Brazil and Australia; India follows Australia in seventh place. Thus Australia occupies sixth position and is the country immediately before India in this ranking, so option A is correct. Nepal, Japan and Sri Lanka are all considerably smaller than India and do not stand immediately before it in the global area list. The question concerns area, not population, economic size or coastline length, so only the area ranking should be used.