Hard Geography Quiz
The easy ways in have been removed. These twenty questions live where the atlas gets thumbed thin: capitals that are not their country's famous city, flags a stripe away from their neighbours, and continent calls that sit on the line.
What hard means here
Not obscure for its own sake – near. In a hard geography quiz the wrong options sit close to the right one, on the map or in the mind. Niamey has to be told apart from Ouagadougou, which is a Niger-or-Burkina-Faso question wearing a capitals costume. Vaduz belongs to Liechtenstein, with Luxembourg parked among the options for everyone who files the two small countries in the same drawer. Tegucigalpa is Honduras, and the options offer San Salvador and Belmopan – the genuine capitals of El Salvador and Belize next door – so a vague Central American association picks wrong as easily as right.
The continent questions are the quiet ones
All eight continent questions in this bank are border cases settled by convention: Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Cyprus and Kazakhstan file under Asia here, Russia under Europe, Egypt under Africa. None of those placements is a fact of nature – each country has a genuine claim on a second continent, which is precisely what qualifies the question for this page. Know the convention and eight points come free; trust your gut and the gut splits the difference.
Calibrate your expectations
The ranks do not bend for difficulty – the thresholds are the same on every quiz on this site – so a Traveller here may be worth a Cartographer somewhere gentler. The review at the end holds only what you missed, and on this page that list is usually worth reading twice: these are exactly the facts that will not come up in conversation until the day they matter.