World Map Quiz

Don't try the whole world at once. Learn one region until you can find every country in it without stopping, then add the next. Europe and South America are good places to start, because their countries are big enough to tap and few enough to hold in your head. Africa and Asia take longer. The continent map quizzes linked below are the same map in smaller pieces, and they are the quickest way to fix the gaps a world round shows you.

In each region, place the large countries first and the small ones against them. Russia, Canada, China, the United States, Brazil, Australia, India, Argentina, Kazakhstan and Algeria are the ten largest by area and cover almost half the land on the map. Mongolia sits between Russia and China. Kazakhstan is the wide one south of Russia, with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan below it. Bolivia and Paraguay are the two landlocked countries in the middle of South America.

Most wrong taps come from the same pairs. Niger is the large landlocked country; Nigeria is the coastal one south of it. Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea are three different countries in West and Central Africa, and Papua New Guinea is a fourth, north of Australia. The Republic of the Congo is the smaller one west of the Congo River; the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the giant. Slovakia is north of Hungary, while Slovenia touches Italy and the Adriatic. Iraq is west of Iran and much smaller. Uruguay is on the coast between Brazil and Argentina; Paraguay is inland.

The places people miss are usually small and wedged between big neighbours: Lesotho, inside South Africa, and Eswatini (Swaziland on the list), on its eastern edge; Rwanda and Burundi, between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania; Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa; Lebanon and Israel, on the eastern Mediterranean; Brunei, on the north coast of Borneo; Bhutan, between India and China; and Kosovo and Montenegro, in the Balkans. The map has 175 places, including territories such as Greenland, Western Sahara, the Falkland Islands, Puerto Rico and New Caledonia. Countries too small to tap at world scale, like Singapore, Malta, Andorra and most Caribbean islands, are not in this round.