The Canada Quiz

The second-largest country: ten provinces, three territories, a lot of north. This pack draws from 15 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.

Canada is the second-largest country, and almost nobody pins the north

Canada spans roughly five thousand kilometres from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and reaches from the 42nd parallel to the Arctic Ocean above 83 degrees north. The southern strip, where most people live, sits along the US border and is well mapped in most players' heads. The north, where this pack separates good from great, is almost entirely absent from the mental map, because almost nobody has been there and the places are settlements of dozens, not cities of millions. The single most valuable habit in this pack is asking whether a clue is in the populated south or the Arctic north, because the latitude difference is forty degrees and the distance is continental.

The southern anchor is the Windsor to Quebec City corridor, where Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa sit within a few hundred kilometres of each other along the Saint Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Vancouver sits on the Pacific coast, separated from them by the width of the Rockies and the prairies. So the south is really two clusters, east and west, with a lot of empty grassland between.

Three bands that hold the country

The Great Lakes corridor. Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa sit in the southeast, between roughly 45 and 46 degrees north, on or near the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. Toronto is on Lake Ontario; Montreal is on the Saint Lawrence; Ottawa, the capital, sits inland between them. The CN Tower in Toronto is in this cluster. The error here is placing these cities too far west, because most players picture Canada as a Pacific-rim country when its population core is Atlantic-facing.

The Pacific coast. Vancouver sits on the Pacific at about 49 degrees north, just above the US border. Banff sits in the Rockies of Alberta, a few hundred kilometres inland. The distance from Vancouver to Toronto is over four thousand kilometres, so a confident "somewhere in Canada" guess that lands on the wrong cluster is a continental miss. The habit is asking which coast, because the two southern clusters share almost nothing except the border.

The Arctic north. Iqaluit, Resolute, Alert, Grise Fiord, Inuvik, Whitehorse and Yellowknife are where even good players run out of map. Iqaluit sits on Baffin Island at about 64 degrees north. Resolute sits on Cornwallis Island at 74 degrees north. Alert, the northernmost permanently inhabited place in Canada, sits at 82 degrees north on the Arctic Ocean. Grise Fiord is nearby. The habit is pure latitude: if a clue is Arctic and Canadian, the pin goes above the Arctic Circle, not in the populated south. These places are small, remote, and they decide the leaderboard.

What makes a Canadian run hard

The pack's 15 places are small but punishing, because the latitude span is the widest of any country pack. A pin on Toronto for a Vancouver clue is a four-thousand-kilometre miss; a pin on Ottawa for Iqaluit is two thousand. The Cabot Strait sits between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, on the Atlantic coast, while the Strait of Juan de Fuca sits on the Pacific coast between Washington state and Vancouver Island, so even the straits span the full width of the country. The discipline this pack builds is latitude awareness at the scale of a continent, not a country. For the capitals that were chosen for political compromise, The Capitals Nobody Guesses traces Ottawa, Queen Victoria's lumber-town pick. For the broader skill of judging how far a thousand-kilometre miss really is, How Far Is a Degree? turns latitude into kilometres.

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

• Alert · Canada
• Banff · Canada
• Grise Fiord · Canada
• Inuvik · Canada
• Iqaluit · Canada
• Montreal · Canada
• Ottawa · Canada
• Resolute · Canada
• The Cabot Strait · Canada
• The CN Tower · Canada

…and 5 more across the pack.

More by country

• The United States quiz · Coast to coast, plus Alaska and Hawaii. Fifty states of muscle memory.

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