World Geography Quiz: Test Your Map Skills

Trivia Quizzes General Knowledge

The map most people carry around in their heads is a Mercator projection, drawn in 1569 to help sailors plot a straight compass bearing across a curved planet, and it does that job at the cost of wrecking every area near the poles. Greenland comes out looking roughly the size of Africa on it. Africa is about fourteen times larger. Russia looks like it swallows the top of the world, Antarctica smears into an endless white band along the bottom, and countries near the equator shrink into something smaller than they have any right to be. Almost every intuition people have about relative size traces back to a four-hundred-year-old navigation tool, which is a reasonable place to start when working out why so much geography knowledge feels solid right up to the moment somebody asks a direct question about it.

Capital cities are where that gap shows up most reliably. Sydney and Melbourne spent the 1890s arguing over which of them should run the new Australian federation, and the resolution in 1908 was to build a third city on empty sheep country roughly halfway between the two and call it Canberra, a compromise capital with a fraction of either rival’s population. Canada arrived at the same answer half a century earlier when Queen Victoria settled the dispute between Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City by choosing Ottawa, a lumber town on the border between the English and French halves of the province. Brasilia, Ankara and Abuja were all built or promoted for comparable reasons. The largest city is very often not the capital, and the exceptions are usually the result of an argument somebody had to end.

The physical superlatives hold up better under scrutiny, mostly because the numbers involved are absurd enough to be memorable. The Sahara covers about 9.2 million square kilometres, roughly the area of the United States, and it is only the largest hot desert, since Antarctica is technically a desert and considerably bigger. Vatican City occupies 0.49 square kilometres, about 110 acres, small enough to walk across in twenty minutes. Everest reaches 8,849 metres above sea level, though it is not the tallest mountain measured from its own base, and the Pacific spreads across about a third of the planet’s surface, more than every landmass on Earth combined.

A surprising number of the political facts are inherited from decisions rather than from the landscape. The Ural Mountains divide Europe from Asia because a Russian geographer named Vasily Tatishchev proposed them as the boundary in the 1720s and the convention stuck, not because the range presents any real obstacle. Brazil speaks Portuguese while every neighbour speaks Spanish because the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 drew a line through an ocean nobody had crossed yet and handed Portugal the part of South America that had not yet been found. France holds more time zones than any other country, twelve of them, on the strength of overseas territories running from French Polynesia to Reunion, which puts it ahead of Russia and its eleven.

The questions move between both halves of the subject, the physical map and the political one: the largest country by land area, the longest river, the ocean with the greatest surface area, the driest continent after Antarctica, the sea separating Europe from Africa, and the capitals that catch people who guessed the biggest city instead. Each question is set out again with its correct answer below the quiz, so it is straightforward enough to see whether the weak spots are in the deserts, the capitals or the mountain ranges.