The United States Quiz

Coast to coast, plus Alaska and Hawaii. Fifty states of muscle memory. This pack draws from 43 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 United States is not one map, it is three

The lower forty-eight sit between roughly the 25th and 49th parallels, a block over four thousand kilometres wide. Alaska reaches above the Arctic Circle in the far northwest, and Hawaii lies in the central Pacific, south of the Tropic of Cancer. A pack that treats these as one country will mispin all three, because the scale changes by a factor of ten between them. The mainland alone spans four time zones, and the gap from Honolulu to New York is wider than the Atlantic. So the first skill in this pack is asking which United States a clue means before you touch the globe.

The biggest leak for most players is the interior. The coasts are drilled into the mental map by films and news, but the middle of the country is where confident guesses become thousand-kilometre misses. Chicago, St Louis and Denver are the anchors that hold the interior together, and they are the places non-Americans most often pin a time zone too far east or west.

Three anchors that fix the lower forty-eight

The Mississippi spine. The river runs roughly north to south through the middle of the country, and it is the most reliable divider you have. St Louis sits on it, Memphis sits on it, New Orleans sits at its mouth. Anything west of the Mississippi leans toward the dry half of the continent; anything east toward the wet. When a clue feels central and you cannot place it, the river is your first guess.

The dry line. Somewhere near the 100th meridian west, the country stops being green and starts being arid. The Great Plains give way to the Rockies, and the cities thin out. Denver sits just east of the mountains; the desert parks, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas sit west of them. If a clue mentions desert, canyon or mesa, push the pin west of that line.

The Great Lakes corner. Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo all sit on or near the Great Lakes in the northeast, and Niagara Falls straddles the border with Canada. The error here is placing these cities too far south: the lakes sit at the latitude of central France, but most players put them a thousand kilometres below that. When a clue is northern and industrial, aim at the lakes, not the mid-Atlantic.

Alaska and Hawaii are the real separators

The places that decide a leaderboard run are the two non-contiguous states, because each breaks a different assumption. Hawaii is tropical: Honolulu sits at about 21 degrees north, south of the Tropic of Cancer, in the middle of the Pacific. Players who picture Hawaii just off the California coast lose thousands of kilometres, because it is far southwest of the mainland, closer to Japan than to Florida. Maui and Kauai sit in the same island chain, so once you have Honolulu the rest of Hawaii is a short hop along it.

Alaska is the opposite problem: it is enormous, and its populated places hug the southern and western coasts while the Brooks Range and the North Slope run to the Arctic. Anchorage sits at roughly 61 degrees north; Utqiaġvik, the northernmost settlement, sits above 71 degrees. Nome, Adak and Unalaska are out on the western coast and the Aleutian chain, which arcs toward Russia. The Bering Strait, also in this pack, sits between Alaska and Chukotka, so the whole northwest corner of the pack is closer to Asia than to the rest of the United States.

What makes an American run hard

The pack mixes cities with natural landmarks, and the landmarks punish anyone who only knows the country from its coasts. Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota, not somewhere scenic on a coast; Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon are in the southwest; Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in North America, sits across the river from St Louis. Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming, Yosemite is in California's Sierra Nevada, and Crater Lake is in Oregon, and the three are not interchangeable. A confident "western park" guess spreads across a thousand kilometres if you do not know which state.

For the systematic way to build the map this pack rewards, the twelve-anchor method sets the fixed points the rest of the country hangs from. For judging how far a thousand-kilometre miss really is on a blank globe, How Far Is a Degree? turns latitude and longitude into kilometres you can feel.

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
• Boston · USA
• Bryce Canyon · Utah, USA
• Cahokia · Illinois, USA
• Chaco Canyon · New Mexico, USA
• Chicago · USA
• Crater Lake · Oregon, USA
• Denali · Alaska, USA
• Fort Yukon · Alaska, USA
• Honolulu · Hawaii, USA

…and 33 more across the pack.

More by country

• The Canada quiz · The second-largest country: ten provinces, three territories, a lot of north.

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