The The Americas Quiz

North and South together, Arctic tundra to Tierra del Fuego. This pack draws from 146 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

The Americas are one landmass and two scales

This pack draws from both continents, Arctic tundra to Tierra del Fuego, and the scale changes more dramatically than anywhere else in the atlas. North America is wide: New York to Los Angeles is roughly four thousand kilometres. South America is tall: Caracas to Ushuaia is over six thousand, and the continent narrows to a point at its southern tip. A confident "somewhere in the Americas" guess that lands on the wrong end of that span is a miss no partial credit rescues, so the first habit is asking which America a clue means, north or south, before you think about the country.

The single biggest leak for most players is the southern cone. The familiar North American cities, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, are drilled into the mental map, but the stretch from Bolivia to Patagonia is where confident guesses become thousand-kilometre misses. Santiago is not Buenos Aires; Lima is not La Paz; Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, sits at 55 degrees south, further from the equator than Edinburgh.

Four bands that hold the twin continents

The US-Canada core. New York, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, Washington, Montreal, Vancouver and Seattle cluster across the northern third of North America, between roughly 40 and 49 degrees north. The Great Lakes hold the eastern half together: Chicago, Toronto and the CN Tower in Toronto all sit on or near them. The error here is placing these cities too far south, because the latitude is central France, not the Caribbean.

Mexico and Central America. Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Cancún, Guatemala City, San Salvador, Panama City and San José sit between roughly 8 and 25 degrees north, a band most players systematically place too far south. Mexico City is at the latitude of Hawaii, not of South America. The Panama Canal, also in this pack, sits at about 9 degrees north, where the land bridge is narrowest.

The Andean spine. Bogotá, Quito, Lima, La Paz, Santiago and Cusco, near Machu Picchu, all sit on or near the Andes, the longest continental mountain range on Earth. The range runs north-south along the Pacific coast, so a place that is "Andean" belongs on the western side of the continent, not the Atlantic shore. Quito sits almost exactly on the equator; Bogotá is at 2,600 metres in the highlands; Lima is on the desert coast. The latitude span is enormous, so sorting by elevation and coast is the habit that pays.

The southern cone and the Atlantic coast. Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba and Córdoba sit on the Atlantic side of the southern half, between about 23 and 38 degrees south. They share latitudes with South Africa and Australia, so the reflex that puts them in the tropics costs you. Brasília, the planned capital, sits inland at about 16 degrees south; São Paulo and Rio sit on the coast. The further south you go, the sparser it gets: Ushuaia, Punta Arenas and Puerto Williams are the end of the road, and the Falkland Islands sit in the South Atlantic at 51 degrees south.

What makes an Americas run hard

The pack mixes cities, natural wonders and ancient sites, and the confusables are punishing. Iguazú Falls sits on the border of Argentina and Brazil; Angel Falls is in Venezuela, a thousand kilometres north. The Galápagos sit in the Pacific off Ecuador at about 1 degree south, not in the Caribbean. Easter Island belongs to Chile but sits in the central Pacific, 3,500 kilometres from the mainland. The Greenland places, Nuuk, Ilulissat, Qaanaaq, sit between 60 and 77 degrees north and break the "Americas are temperate" reflex. For the capitals that moved inland, Brasília and Ottawa, The Capitals Nobody Guesses traces them. For the systematic way to build the map this pack rewards, the twelve-anchor method sets the fixed points the twin continents hang from.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

• Adak · Alaska, USA
• Alert · Canada
• Angel Falls · Venezuela
• Antigua · Caribbean
• Arequipa · Peru
• Aruba · Caribbean
• Asunción · Paraguay
• Banff · Canada
• Barbados · Caribbean
• Belo Horizonte · Brazil

…and 136 more across the pack.

More by region

• The Europe quiz · From Reykjavík to the Caucasus. Every European place in the atlas.
• The Asia quiz · The largest continent, from the Levant to the Pacific rim.
• The Africa quiz · The whole continent, Maghreb to Cape, and easy to misplace.

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