Geographic Skills Quiz

Justin -
Thanks for the tip...I got that one wrong too.

Sad, too. When I was a kid, I loved Carmen Sandiego, and I had all the country locations memorized. You know, in case I ever got on the show and made it to the last round :o)

I think the folks who feel they didn't do too well shouldn't beat themselves crazy over it. If anything this should provide an incentive to go out and learn about everything you can! Knowledge, is a powerful thing even when you don't get to use it you challenge yourself and those around you. My suggestion is if you want to do one step better is to subscribe to a magazine like National Geographic! Or make the habit of sitting the family down and watch a show on Discovery or the History network.

As well, if you have kids put up a map on their wall and quiz them every night on 5 countries and where they are! Stimulate your brains! :)

Ok, I got 5 out of 8, but I accidentally clicked the wrong answer once (twitchy finger on the mouse).

I figured the US had more people!

No excuses for Afghanistan. I just didn't know where it was. I knew where Syria and Iraq were, and I figured the big thing was Arabia and the little countries at the straits were Yemen and something else. So, what's the big country that I hit with the pin (west of Afghanistan)?

Aaagh! It's Iran? Now I feel dumb as dirt! I no longer deserve to live. (My daughter cheated and looked it up on a map.)

It was a toss-up on the languages. I knew there were a lot of Chinese (got that part of the population question right), but I also heard that Arabic is widespread, but not necessarily as a "native" language.

RE: Cartographer. I read in a news article that cartography was slated to be a lost and obsolete discipline, until Geographic Information Systems (GIS) suddently became important. Now, cartography is cool, and everyone wants to do it. For myself, I need to use GPS just to get around town, or to find my car in the parking lot at the mall.

8/8 - Vancouver Canadian. I personally know someone from every continent, country, and state in the quiz. Except for Afghanistan and Iraq, I've visited someone I know who lives in those nation states. Sometimes I'm truly convinced that Vancouver is a microcosm of the planet. Looking around here sometimes, its so easy to see where William Gibson gets some of his strange dystopic, globalized society ideas. When I go somewhere as a foreigner, its weird because I'm used to being around so many other foreigners.

These statistics don't surprise me. I remember sitting in my sophomore world history class in high school and being utterly dumbfounded by how little most of the students around me knew about the world they lived in. We were given the assignment to label major world landmarks and people were asking me where the Amazon river is and where Europe is.

As to fixing this, I think that the number one culprit in this sort of ignorance is the parents. Parents fail to get their children interested in the world outside of their home. They don't show their kids maps or talk about the world outside of America. Heck, how many people never leave their home state?