The Great Victoria Desert is the largest desert of:

The Great Victoria Desert is the largest desert in Australia, covering about 3.48 lakh square km across Western Australia and South Australia.

Features of the Great Victoria Desert:

• It is about 700 km wide from west to east.
• It consists of sand dunes, sandy plains, salt lakes and gibber (stony) plains, with grasslands and scattered shrubs.
• It receives little and irregular rainfall, about 200 to 250 mm a year, with very hot summers.
• It was named in 1875 by the British-born explorer Ernest Giles, after Queen Victoria.
• It is home to Aboriginal communities, such as the Anangu, and has protected areas, including the Mamungari Conservation Park, a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
• In the 1950s and 1960s, British nuclear weapons tests were carried out at Maralinga, at its southern edge.

Deserts of Australia:

• Australia is the driest inhabited continent, and about 18 percent of its area is desert; much more is arid or semi-arid.
• Its major deserts include the Great Victoria, Great Sandy, Tanami, Simpson, Gibson and Little Sandy deserts.

Why Australia has large deserts:

• It lies largely in the subtropical high-pressure belt (around 20 to 30 degrees South), where dry, sinking air prevents rain.
• The Great Dividing Range along the east coast blocks moist winds from the Pacific Ocean, creating a rain shadow inland.
• The cold West Australian Current along the west coast makes the air dry.

World's largest deserts:

• The largest desert overall is the Antarctic polar desert, followed by the Arctic.
• The largest hot desert is the Sahara in North Africa, covering about 9 million square km.
• Other large hot deserts include the Arabian Desert, the Kalahari (southern Africa) and the Thar Desert (India and Pakistan).

Why not the other options?

• ✗Africa's largest desert is the Sahara.
• ✗South America's notable deserts include the Atacama (one of the driest places on Earth) and Patagonia.
• ✗Asia has the Gobi, Arabian and Thar deserts.