Countries, capitals, coastlines and the people who mapped them.
Geography is the subject that makes the news make sense. Once you know where the Strait of Hormuz is, or why so many capital cities sit on rivers, a lot of history and politics stops being a list of names and starts being a map you can read.
These quizzes cover the physical world and the human one: the countries and capitals, the islands and coastlines, the flags nations chose for themselves, and the explorers and cartographers who worked out the shape of it all. Some of it is recall — you either know the capital of Kyrgyzstan or you don't. Most of it isn't. The better questions here are the ones where the answer has a reason behind it, and the explanation tells you what that reason is.
Start anywhere. If a topic looks unfamiliar, that's usually the one worth playing.
Capitals, borders, rivers and the shape of the planet.
The world's cities, including the ones that catch people out.
National symbols and the meanings packed into them.
How islands form, and the ones worth knowing.
Ships, rails, roads and the routes that connect them.
The voyages that redrew the map, and their costs.
How the round world gets flattened onto paper.
Ptolemy, al-Idrisi, portolan charts and the draughtsman who straightened the Underground.
Ptolemy's Geographia, written in the second century, was influential chiefly because it did…
From the Nile to the Amazon — the great rivers that shaped where we live.
Which river is traditionally considered the longest in the world?
Metros, buses, traffic and the counterintuitive rules of urban transport.
Which city opened the world's first underground railway?
Countries inside countries, straight lines drawn badly, and territory nobody claims.
Which country is entirely surrounded by South Africa?
The driest, coldest, highest and most remote places, and what makes them that way.
What is the largest desert on Earth?
Grid references, bearings, declination and what the spacing of contour lines is telling you.
On a hillside, what does the spacing between contour lines tell you?
Inland journeys, the guides who made them possible, and the names that were already there.
The first descent of the Amazon by a European party, in 1541 and 1542, was led by whom?
Ships crushed in ice, disputed claims, and the people whose names were left off the reports.
Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was lost in 1915 in what way?
A converted tanker sailed from New Jersey in 1956 with 58 steel boxes on deck, and the cost of moving goods across an ocean fell…
Read article 12 min readColumbus died insisting he had been near Asia, and every coast in the story was already inhabited. Here's the version with the…
Read article 11 min readCanberra, Ottawa, Brasilia and Washington all exist because two rival cities each preferred a neutral third option to letting…
Read article33 published quizzes across 7 topics, 330 questions in total. Every one is researched, written and checked by hand.
The mix here is 7 easy, 19 medium and 7 hard. Difficulty is about how obscure the answers are, not how fast you have to be — there is no timer on any quiz.
About 7 minutes on average, ranging from 6 to 9. Playing every quiz in this section would take roughly 4 hours.
No. Every quiz is free and playable straight away. An optional free account only saves your scores across devices.
Yes — every question has a short explanation of why the right answer is right, shown the moment you answer, whether you got it or not.