Geography Trivia Questions and Answers: 40 Questions to Test Yourself

Whether you are warming up for a pub quiz, running a class quiz on a Friday afternoon or just want to know how much of the world map you really carry in your head, here are 40 geography trivia questions with their answers. They start easy and get harder within each section, and every answer comes with a short fact, because the fact is what makes it stick.

Try to answer each one before you read on. Keep score: one point per question, and see how you did at the end.

Capital cities

1. What is the capital of Australia?

Canberra. It was chosen as a compromise between the rivals Sydney and Melbourne, and built from scratch in the early 20th century.

2. What is the capital of Canada?

Ottawa, not Toronto or Montreal. It sits on the border between Ontario and Quebec.

3. What is the capital of Turkey?

Ankara. Istanbul is far bigger, but Ankara has been the capital since 1923.

4. Which city became Brazil’s capital in 1960?

Brasília, a planned city built in the interior to replace Rio de Janeiro.

5. What is the northernmost capital of a sovereign country?

Reykjavík, Iceland. Its name means “smoky bay”, after the steam from its hot springs.

6. What is the southernmost capital of a sovereign country?

Wellington, New Zealand, at about 41° south.

7. Which country has three capital cities?

South Africa: Pretoria (government), Cape Town (parliament) and Bloemfontein (the highest court).

8. Which city, at about 3,600 metres, is the highest seat of government in the world?

La Paz, Bolivia. Bolivia’s constitutional capital is Sucre.

Countries and borders

9. What is the largest country in the world by area?

Russia, at about 17 million square kilometres, almost twice the size of Canada in second place.

10. What is the smallest country in the world?

Vatican City, at under half a square kilometre, entirely surrounded by the city of Rome.

11. Which country is completely surrounded by South Africa?

Lesotho. It is also the only country whose entire territory lies above 1,000 metres.

12. What is the largest landlocked country?

Kazakhstan. The Caspian Sea on its western edge is a lake, not an ocean.

13. Which two countries are “doubly landlocked”, surrounded only by other landlocked countries?

Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan.

14. Which two countries border the most other countries?

China and Russia, with 14 neighbours each.

15. How many countries are there in Africa?

54, the most of any continent.

16. Which country has the most time zones, counting its overseas territories?

France, with 12, thanks to territories from the Caribbean to the Pacific.

Mountains, rivers and oceans

17. What is the highest mountain above sea level?

Mount Everest, on the border of Nepal and China, at 8,849 metres.

18. What is usually named as the longest river in the world?

The Nile, at about 6,650 km, although some measurements put the Amazon slightly ahead.

19. What is the largest ocean?

The Pacific. It covers about a third of the Earth’s surface, more than all the land put together.

20. What is the largest hot desert?

The Sahara. The largest desert of all, counting cold deserts, is Antarctica.

21. What is the deepest lake in the world?

Lake Baikal in Siberia, at about 1,640 metres deep. It holds around a fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh surface water.

22. What is the largest lake in the world by area?

The Caspian Sea. The largest freshwater lake by area is Lake Superior.

23. Where is the lowest point on dry land?

The shore of the Dead Sea, between Jordan and the West Bank, about 430 metres below sea level.

24. In which country is Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world?

Venezuela. Its water drops about 979 metres, with an uninterrupted fall of about 807 metres.

Famous landmarks

25. In which country is Machu Picchu?

Peru, high in the Andes above the Urubamba valley.

26. In which country is the ancient city of Petra?

Jordan. Its buildings are carved straight into the pink sandstone cliffs.

27. In which country is Angkor Wat?

Cambodia, near the city of Siem Reap. It appears on the Cambodian flag.

28. On which mountain does the Christ the Redeemer statue stand?

Corcovado, above Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

29. On the banks of which river is the Taj Mahal?

The Yamuna, in the city of Agra in northern India.

30. In which city is the Sagrada Família?

Barcelona, Spain. Antoni Gaudí started work on it in 1883.

31. In which Australian territory is Uluru?

The Northern Territory, in the red centre of the country.

32. Off the coast of which Australian state is the Great Barrier Reef?

Queensland. It is the largest coral reef system in the world.

Flags

33. Which is the only national flag that is not a rectangle?

Nepal’s, made of two stacked triangles.

34. Which two national flags are square?

Switzerland and Vatican City.

35. Which two national flags show a map of the country?

Cyprus and Kosovo.

36. Which country’s flag has a cedar tree in the middle?

Lebanon.

People and history

37. Which country has the most people?

India, which passed China in 2023 according to United Nations estimates.

38. What was Istanbul called before 1930?

Constantinople, the name it carried for most of the Byzantine and Ottoman centuries.

39. In which year did the Panama Canal open?

1914. It saves ships the long voyage around the tip of South America.

40. In which year did the Berlin Wall fall?

1989, on the night of 9 November.

How did you score?

• 35 to 40: you could run the quiz yourself. Try the hardest regions of the Map Quiz.
• 25 to 34: a strong all-rounder. Capitals and flags are usually where the last points are hiding.
• 15 to 24: a good base to build on. Our guide to getting better at geography quizzes shows where the quickest gains are.
• Under 15: everyone starts somewhere, and every question above is now one you know.

Want more questions?

A quiz you only take once is soon forgotten. The daily GeoPlay quiz gives you five new geography questions every day, and you answer by tapping the spot on a 3D globe, so a close guess still scores. Every past quiz and its answers are in the geography quiz archive, which makes a ready-made question bank for a quiz night or a lesson.

To practise one topic at a time, try the Capital Quiz for capitals, Guess the Flag for flags and Guess the Country for country outlines. Playing with a team or a class? A private group gives you your own daily leaderboard, and our page for teachers explains how to set one up.

Figures follow widely used references such as the CIA World Factbook and United Nations population estimates. Spotted something that has changed? Let us know through the contact page.