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World Capitals Master Challenge

Think you're a geography expert? Test your knowledge of world capitals with challenging questions featuring countries from every continent.

Questions

Reward

260

120

Entry

110

Category•geography

Difficulty•Hard

About This Quiz

Every question in this quiz is chosen because the obvious answer is wrong. There is a whole class of country where the biggest, most famous, most photographed city is not the seat of government, and that gap is where the entire fourteen questions live. Ask most people to name a particular country's capital and they will confidently produce its largest city, and in these cases they will be mistaken. Some of these countries deliberately built a new capital inland, some moved the seat of government for political reasons, and a few have more than one capital serving different constitutional functions. It is rated Hard and it deserves the rating. Nothing here can be guessed from general familiarity, because general familiarity is precisely what the questions are designed to defeat. If you enjoy the specific satisfaction of knowing a fact that most confident people get wrong, this is the quiz for you.

Topics Covered

Capitals across multiple continents

Frequently confused capital cities

Administrative and constitutional capitals

Asian and Central Asian capitals

African and European capitals

Notable facts about national capitals

Before You Play

Background and what to expect. No answers given away.

Largest city and capital are different jobs

A capital is where the government sits. That is a political decision, and it is frequently made against the commercial and cultural centre rather than in favour of it. Countries choose smaller cities for balance between regions, for defensibility, for neutrality between rival populations, or simply because a leader decided to build somewhere new.

So the instinct that produces the wrong answer is not ignorance. It is the perfectly reasonable assumption that the most important city is the capital, which happens to be false surprisingly often.

Purpose-built capitals are a whole category

Several countries have constructed a capital from nothing, usually in the twentieth century, usually inland, and usually to move power away from a coastal commercial hub. These cities tend to be planned, geometric and much smaller than the place they replaced.

A number of the answers here are cities of this type. If a country you associate with one enormous famous city appears in a question, the answer is often a planned city you have barely heard of.

Some countries have more than one

A handful of states split their capital functions, with the legislature in one city, the executive in another and sometimes the judiciary in a third. In those cases there is a constitutional capital and a de facto seat of government, and they are not the same place.

Questions about these countries are testing whether you know which function is being asked about. It is the single most technical thing in this quiz.

Renaming is common and recent

Capitals change their names, sometimes more than once, often as part of a political transition. A city you learned at school may be listed under something else now, and in at least one case a capital has been renamed and then partly renamed back.

If a name looks unfamiliar, that does not mean it is wrong. It may simply be more current than the version you were taught.

The Challenge

Every wrong option is a real, famous city in the correct country. You are not being asked to identify the right place on a map, you are being asked to override the name that comes to mind first.

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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