Geography quiz
Capital Quiz
Ten countries a round, four capitals to choose from — answer and the globe spins to the reveal. Built on the same Natural Earth open data as every GlobeVS tool.
Ten questions. One globe.
Name the capital of ten countries — three wrong options trail every question, most of them from the same continent. Answer correctly and the globe flies to the country with a gold pin on its capital.
How this tool works
- Press start — the quiz deals ten countries, each drawn from the 175 capital-bearing countries in the dataset; every round reshuffles.
- Read the question — “What is the capital of France?” — and pick one of the four options: the right capital plus three other countries' capitals, most of them from the same continent.
- The answer is revealed instantly: the picked option is marked, the panel beside the question highlights the country on an interactive globe and drops a gold pin on its capital, with the coordinates spelled out.
- After ten questions you get your score, the per-question result strip and your best round (saved only in your browser) — press play again and the countries reshuffle.
Data & method
Questions and answers come from the same open dataset as every GlobeVS tool: Natural Earth 1:110m country boundaries (public domain), with each country's capital joined from Natural Earth's populated places dataset by Natural Earth's own ADM0_A3 codes, plus a small committed set of manually sourced overrides. 175 of the 176 countries carry a capital point — Antarctica is the one exception (no capital, null by design) and never enters the pool. Capital names follow the locale: the English page keeps the Natural Earth form — the English/local city name — while the Chinese page also shows Simplified-Chinese capital names sourced from Wikidata (CC0), falling back to that same Natural Earth form wherever Wikidata has no Chinese label; we still don't invent city-name translations we can't source (the zh question's country names come from mledoze, ODbL). Wrong options are other countries' capitals, preferring the same continent; names are always distinct and never the correct answer. The quiz itself is a JavaScript enhancement — without it you can still read the guide, the data note and the FAQ on this page, and the start panel above shows exactly what a round deals.
Embed this tool
Add the capital quiz to your own site: paste the snippet below into your HTML and it loads the same interactive quiz inside an iframe, with a small non-removable “Powered by” attribution link back to this page. The embed is available in English.
<iframe src="https://globevs.com/embed/capital-quiz" width="800" height="600" title="Capital Quiz — GlobeVS" loading="lazy" style="border:0;max-width:100%" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups"></iframe>FAQ
Which countries does the quiz cover?
175 of the 176 countries in the dataset — every one that has a capital point. Antarctica is the single exclusion: the boundary dataset lists it as a country-like feature, but it has no capital (null by design), so a “capital of Antarctica” question would be unanswerable. Each round deals 10 countries at random, so over a few rounds you will meet most of the world.
Where does the data come from?
From the same open data as every GlobeVS tool: Natural Earth 1:110m boundaries (public domain) with capitals from Natural Earth's populated places dataset, joined by Natural Earth's ADM0_A3 codes, plus a small committed set of manually sourced overrides where the automated join was wrong. Nothing is hand-typed per quiz — the pool is generated from the committed dataset at load time.
Where do the capital names come from?
The English page shows capital names exactly as the dataset records them — Natural Earth's English/local city forms (“Beijing”, “Washington, D.C.”). The Chinese version additionally shows Simplified-Chinese capital names sourced from Wikidata (CC0, community-maintained), falling back to that same Natural Earth form wherever Wikidata has no Chinese label — we don't invent city-name translations we can't source.
What happens with disputed capitals?
Each country contributes the single capital seat recorded for it in Natural Earth (or a sourced override). Where a capital's status is internationally disputed, the quiz shows that one recorded seat and takes no political position — the coordinates and names are the public-domain dataset's, and the answer options are always other countries' capitals, never alternative claimants.
Where is my best score stored?
Only in your own browser, in localStorage — no account, no server, nothing leaves your device. Clearing the site's data resets the best round. Every round is 10 questions, one point each; the result strip at the end shows which questions you hit and missed.