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?
Loading marks, draught, tonnage and the vocabulary of the merchant fleet.
On a ship, what do "port" and "starboard" refer to?
Lift, ailerons, turbofans, holding patterns and why the black box is orange.
An aircraft wing generates lift chiefly by doing what?
Coats of arms, national animals, plants and personifications — the symbols countries use when a flag will not do.
Which flower is the emblem of the Japanese imperial family?
Dragons, lions, temples and one island drawn in copper — ten things countries put in the middle of their flags.
Which country's flag features a temple complex?
Square flags, two-sided flags, a flag with a rifle on it and one that is flown upside down in wartime.
The off-centre cross used by Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland is known as what?
Where the colours on national flags come from, and the families of flags that share them.
On the flag of Ireland, the orange band is generally understood to represent which group?
Hotspots, subduction, sinking volcanoes and drowned hills — the four or five ways land ends up surrounded by sea.
The Hawaiian island chain formed as the Pacific plate drifted over what?
Prisons, exiles, monasteries and one very expensive swap involving nutmeg.
Which island in New York Harbor processed arriving immigrants between 1892 and 1954?
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.