What does the quiz cover?

Three kinds of questions: the capitals of thirty European countries, the capitals of the twelve Dutch provinces, and the continent of eighteen countries from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania. That makes 60 questions in three rounds of twenty.

Are there maps in the quiz?

No. These are text questions with four answers. A map trains finding a place, this round trains the name that goes with it. If you want to learn where countries lie, keep an atlas open next to the quiz.

No. Your answers stay on this page and are gone when you close it. We do not ask for an account and we do not count your score.

Geography quiz: 20 questions on capitals and continents (free)

Twenty questions with four answers each: the capital of a country or of a Dutch province, or the continent a country is on. Pick your answers, press the check button and you see how many are right, with the right answer under every question you missed.

How this geography quiz works

Every question has four answers and one is right. The wrong answers come from the same kind of question: for a country they are the capitals of other countries, for a province the capitals of other provinces. Guessing blind therefore earns you about a quarter right, and more only if you know something. A question left empty counts as a miss.

The first round is always the same twenty questions, so you can come back next week and compare with today. After checking, the button for the next twenty gives you a fresh round in a fixed order. After three rounds you have seen all 60 and the list starts again.

Capitals that are not the biggest city

Most mistakes on capital questions come from naming the largest city. Bern is the capital of Switzerland, not Zurich or Geneva. The capital of the Netherlands is Amsterdam, although the government sits in The Hague. Among the Dutch provinces, North Holland has Haarlem as its capital, South Holland has The Hague and North Brabant has 's-Hertogenbosch.

European capitals worth grouping

Learn capitals in groups rather than one by one. Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius belong to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from north to south. Vienna, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest sit along the Danube and its neighbours in central Europe. Zagreb, Ljubljana and Belgrade cover the western Balkans, and Sofia and Bucharest the east.

Countries and continents

The third part gives you a country outside Europe and asks for its continent. The six continents in the answers are Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America. Mexico belongs to North America, Kazakhstan to Asia and New Zealand to Oceania. This is the part where an atlas helps most, because you remember where a country lies by seeing it.

How to learn geography

Practise in short rounds, a few times a week. Write down the questions you missed and try them again a day later without looking. Because the list is fixed, a better result next time means you learned the answers. It is a quick check of what you know and says nothing about how smart you are.

More to try

The same quiz exists in Dutch on topografie oefenen. For other short tests, the brain games page has five of them, and the spelling test works the same way as this quiz.