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Mountains of the World Challenge

Test your knowledge of famous mountains, mountain ranges, and the world's highest peaks.

Questions

Reward

160

Entry

Category•geography

Difficulty•Medium

About This Quiz

Mountains are the part of geography people retain longest, because they come with stories attached: expeditions, disasters, records, national symbolism. This quiz works across twelve questions covering both individual peaks and the ranges they sit inside, which are two different kinds of knowledge that get conflated constantly. Knowing that a mountain is famous is easy. Knowing which chain it belongs to, which countries its borders run through, and where it sits in the ranking is the harder part, and that is what most of these questions ask for. The selection is deliberately spread across continents rather than concentrating on the tallest ones, so a few of the answers are peaks that are modest in height and enormous in cultural significance. A mountain does not need to be high to be the most recognisable thing about its country.

Topics Covered

The highest mountains in the world

Major mountain ranges

Mountain locations and bordering countries

Important peaks by continent

The geographical significance of mountain systems

Well-known mountain landmarks

Before You Play

Background and what to expect. No answers given away.

Ranges are the unit, peaks are the highlight

Mountains almost never occur alone. They come in chains formed by the same geological collision, running for thousands of kilometres and crossing many borders. The famous individual summits are simply the highest points of systems that stretch far beyond them.

Several questions ask which range a peak belongs to, which is a different question from where it is. A range can span half a dozen countries while its most famous summit sits on a single border.

The second highest is a harder mountain than the first

Ranking by height and ranking by difficulty are not the same list. The tallest peak in the world is climbed by hundreds of people a year on commercial expeditions. The one immediately below it has a fatality rate that keeps it far rarer, and mountaineers regard it as the serious achievement.

That distinction is well known in climbing circles and less so outside them, and it is exactly the sort of thing a question here will hang on.

Standing alone makes a mountain famous

Some of the most recognisable mountains on Earth are not especially tall but rise in isolation from flat surroundings, which makes them visible for enormous distances and gives them outsized cultural weight. Others are famous for a distinctive shape, a flat summit or a near-perfect cone.

These tend to be the ones that appear on flags, banknotes and tourist boards, and they are drawn from continents the tallest-peak questions never reach.

Some ranges are borders, in every sense

A few of the world's mountain systems serve as the conventional dividing line between continents or major regions, a boundary agreed by geographers rather than dictated by geology.

If a question asks which range separates one thing from another, it is pointing at one of these, and there are not many candidates.

The Challenge

Peak and range are asked about separately. Naming a famous mountain is easy; naming the system it belongs to and the country on the other side of its summit ridge is the part that separates scores.

Quiz Reviewed By

Nikunj Hirpara

Founder & Writer

Nikunj Hirpara founded Unihfy Games and decides what the site works on next. He writes the explanatory guides about how browser games work, and the geography and sports quizzes.

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