Test what you know

What is in each round

The flag quiz shows a flag and asks which country flies it. The capitals quiz names a country and asks for its capital city, which is trickier than it sounds because the capital is often not the biggest city. The shapes quiz draws a country's real outline from border data, with no name, no colour and no neighbours to help. The bigger-country round puts two countries side by side and asks which covers more ground — and it catches almost everyone, because world maps stretch the land near the poles. The animal quiz shows a photograph and asks which animal it is, and the track quiz shows a footprint drawn to its measured size and asks whose it is — the one round here you can take outside with you.

Where to start

If you have never played any of these, start with the flags. Flags are the easiest to remember because they come in families — the Nordic countries all carry an off-centre cross, many Arab countries share the same four colours, and a good number of former British colonies keep a small Union Jack in one corner. Learning one family at a time turns a hundred flags into a dozen patterns.

Save the country outlines for last. That round gives you a shape with no name, no colour and no neighbours around it, which is genuinely hard — and it is also the round that teaches you the most, because after a few games you start noticing the one feature that gives each country away.

The track round is the one that pays off outside. Every drawing is set to a measured size, with a bar underneath showing how wide the real print is, so a lynx and a house cat are told apart by the bar and not by the shape. Learn three or four of them and a muddy path on the way to school starts telling you who walked there before you.

No timer, no streak, no account

None of these quizzes has a clock, and none of them takes anything away when you stop. A child who thinks for a whole minute about a flag is doing the thing the quiz exists for, and punishing that with a countdown would be the wrong lesson. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to install and no score sent to a server.

Every question is built from the same data as the rest of the site, so a quiz answer and a country page can never disagree with each other. When you miss one, the page that explains it is one click away.