We're quite used to being asked about the longest rivers in specific countries, continents, etc. But I don't remember ever being asked about the deepest rivers before.
It's not something that's easy to verify, either. A Google search (deepest river india) did find several sites that agreed that the Brahmaputra is the deepest river in India, and they even seem to agree on its maximum depth, which is 380 feet. But none of them is a site that I'd consider to have any real authority, and for all I know they could just be copying from each other.
Wikipedia tells us that the Brahmaputra flows through four countries: Tibet, China, India and Bangladesh. But Tibet is now part of China, so that's actually only three countries.
Despite their lack of apparent authority, I'm happy to take the word of the websites referred to above and accept that the Brahmaputra is the deepest river in India. But are China and/or Bangladesh alternative answers?
My Google search (see above) also found a couple of sites (The World Geography and the World Atlas) that listed the world's "ten deepest rivers". The Brahmaputra is not one of them. Deepest of all is the Congo, at 720 feet or 820 feet (from those two sites respectively), and it's followed by the Yangtze, Danube, Zambesi, Mekong, Amazon, Yellow, Hudson, St. Lawrence and Mississippi. (The exact order is slightly different on each site; hardly surprising, you may think, given the difficulties of measuring such things – not least where to measure.)
But here the plot thickens. If the Brahmaputra has a maximum depth of 380 feet, it's deeper than all but four of the ten rivers listed in the previous paragraph. So why isn't it one of them?
I haven't been able to answer this question. But I'm going to assume that the figures are correct, and that the Brahmaputra is the world's fifth deepest river.
If it only reaches 380 metres in India, it seems highly unlikely that the part of the Brahmaputra that's in China would anywhere be deeper than the Yangtze, which is said (by World Geography and World Atlas) to have a maximum depth of 656 feet. So we can rule out its being the deepest river in China.
In Bangladesh (according to Wikipedia), the Brahmaputra is known as the Meghna. And here's another thickening of the plot: the Simple English Wikipedia gives the average depth of the Meghna as 1,012 feet (308 m) and the maximum as 1,620 feet (490 m). If this is true, this would make it the deepest river in the world – as one correspondent to The World Geography points out. Bangladesh would have to be an acceptable answer to the MQL question; even if the Brahmaputra is known by a different name in that country, it's still the same river. And it would have to be the deepest river in Bangladesh.
But we are left with the conundrum of why the Brahmaputra (or the Meghna) isn't listed on those two websites as one of the world's ten deepest rivers.
Maybe this is why we don't hear many quiz questions about about the depths of rivers.
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