Hey everyone! Are you good at reading maps? And one without any names? It may seem very simple or it may seem very difficult. However you think about this task, we encourage you to try your hand at it. We invite you to take this geography quiz with answers on recognizing the countries of the world. Today let’s talk a little bit about geography, the world map, and countries.
Geography is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of the Earth and planets. The first person to use this word was Eratosthenes. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities — not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be.
Geography is often defined in terms of two branches: human geography and physical geography. Human geography is concerned with the study of people and their communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across space and place. Physical geography is concerned with studying processes and patterns in the natural environment like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere.
The four historical traditions in geographical research are spatial analyzes of natural and human phenomena, area studies of places and regions, studies of human-land relationships, and the Earth sciences. Geography has been called “the world discipline” and “the bridge between the human and the physical sciences”.
Geography is a systematic study of the Universe and its features. Traditionally, geography has been associated with cartography and place names. Although many geographers are trained in toponymy and cartology, this is not their main preoccupation. Geographers study the space and the temporal database distribution of phenomena, processes, and features as well as the interaction of humans and their environment. Because space and place affect a variety of topics, such as economics, health, climate, plants, and animals, geography is highly interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary nature of the geographical approach depends on an attentiveness to the relationship between physical and human phenomena and their spatial patterns.
A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of Earth. World maps, because of their scale, must deal with the problem of projection. Maps rendered in two dimensions by necessity distort the display of the three-dimensional surface of the earth. While this is true of any map, these distortions reach extremes in a world map. Many techniques have been developed to present world maps that address diverse technical and aesthetic goals.
Charting a world map requires global knowledge of the earth, its oceans, and its continents. From prehistory through the Middle ages, creating an accurate world map would have been impossible because less than half of Earth’s coastlines and only a small fraction of its continental interiors were known to any culture. With exploration that began during the European Renaissance, knowledge of the Earth’s surface accumulated rapidly, such that most of the world’s coastlines had been mapped, at least roughly, by the mid-1700s and the continental interiors by the twentieth century.
Maps of the world generally focus either on political features or on physical features. Political maps emphasize territorial boundaries and human settlement. Physical maps show geographic features such as mountains, soil type, or land use. Geological maps show not only the surface, but characteristics of the underlying rock, fault lines, and subsurface structures. Choropleth maps use color hue and intensity to contrast differences between regions, such as demographic or economic statistics.
A country or state (sometimes called a nation) is a distinct territorial body or political entity. It may be an independent sovereign state or part of a larger state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, a physical territory with a government, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated peoples with distinct political characteristics. It is not inherently sovereign. The largest country is Russia, while the smallest is the microstate Vatican City. The Pitcairn Islands are the least populous, while the most populous is China.
The term “country” can refer to a sovereign state. There is no universal agreement on the number of “countries” in the world since several states have disputed sovereignty status. By one application of the declarative theory of statehood and constitutive theory of statehood, there are 206 sovereign states; of which 193 are members of the UN, two have observer status at the United Nations General Assembly (the Holy See and Palestine), and 11 others are neither a member nor observer at the UNGA.
The degree of autonomy of non-sovereign countries varies widely. Some are possessions of sovereign states, with citizenry at times identical and at times distinct from their own. They are listed together alongside sovereign states on lists of countries, and many are treated as separate “countries of origin” in international trade as the British Virgin Islands and Hong Kong are. A few states consist of a union of smaller polities that are considered countries, such as the Danish Realm, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, France, the Realm of New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
This geography quiz contains twenty questions and twenty pictures about different countries of the world. If you feel up to this challenge, we invite you to click the start button!
