The countries people most often misplace

There is a category of geographic fact that almost everyone gets wrong, and it is not the obscure ones. Nobody feels bad about not knowing where Nauru is. The interesting errors are the confident ones — the countries and relationships people think they know and have backwards.

Nearly all of them come from one of two sources: a map projection that distorts what it shows, or an assumption carried over from a name.

Africa is far larger than it looks

The single most consequential misconception in world geography. On the Mercator projection — the one used by most wall maps and, until recently, most online mapping — Africa appears roughly the same size as Greenland. In reality Africa is about fourteen times larger.

The distortion is not a mistake. Mercator preserves angles, which is what makes it excellent for navigation: a straight line on the map is a constant compass bearing, which is precisely what a sixteenth-century ship needed. The cost of preserving angles is that area inflates as you move away from the equator, and it inflates dramatically near the poles.

The result is that equatorial regions — Africa, South America, Southeast Asia — appear small, and high-latitude regions — Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, Canada — appear enormous. Africa's actual area of about 30 million square kilometres is large enough to contain the United States, China, India and most of Europe simultaneously, with room left over. Very few people picture it that way, because very few people have seen a map that shows it that way.

Most of South America is east of Florida

This one reliably surprises people. The continent is commonly imagined as sitting directly below North America, a straight vertical drop. It does not. South America is shifted substantially east.

Miami sits at about 80° west. Santiago, on Chile's Pacific coast and therefore the western edge of the continent, is at about 70° west — ten degrees east of Miami. The entirety of South America lies east of a line drawn south from Florida, and the eastern tip of Brazil is closer to Africa than it is to the western coast of its own continent.

The practical consequence people find hardest to accept: flying from New York to Santiago involves almost no westward travel at all, which is why the time difference is so small.

Europe is further north than it feels

Rome sits at roughly the same latitude as Chicago. Paris is north of Montreal. London is level with the southern tip of Hudson Bay, and Edinburgh is roughly level with Moscow.

Western Europe's climate is far milder than its latitude would suggest, because of the North Atlantic Current carrying warm water north-east from the Gulf of Mexico. Without it, London's winters would resemble Labrador's. Because people reason from climate to position rather than the other way round, Europe gets mentally shifted several hundred kilometres south.

The countries on two continents

Several countries straddle a continental boundary, and which continent they are assigned to is a convention rather than a fact.

• Russia — about 77% of its land is in Asia, but around 75% of its population lives in the European part. This site counts it as Europe, which is the more common convention and follows where the people and the capital are.
• Turkey — a small part around Istanbul is in Europe, the bulk in Asia. Counted here as Asia. Istanbul is the only major city in the world spanning two continents.
• Egypt — the Sinai Peninsula is in Asia, the rest in Africa. Counted here as Africa.
• Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Cyprus — all sit on or near the boundary and are variously classified. Counted here as Asia, though all four compete in European sporting and cultural bodies.

None of these assignments is more correct than the alternative. They are conventions, and the only thing that matters is that a given source applies one consistently. The continent quiz follows the list above throughout.

Countries confused with each other

A separate class of error, caused by names rather than maps.

• Niger and Nigeria — neighbours, both named after the same river, and very different. Nigeria has over 220 million people and a coastline; Niger has around 26 million and is landlocked and mostly desert.
• Slovakia and Slovenia — not neighbours, though both border Austria and Hungary. Their embassies in some capitals have reportedly met to exchange misdirected post.
• Dominica and the Dominican Republic — two different Caribbean countries around 1,000 kilometres apart, with different languages: English in Dominica, Spanish in the Dominican Republic.
• The three Guineas — Guinea and Guinea-Bissau are neighbours in West Africa; Equatorial Guinea is roughly 3,000 kilometres away in Central Africa and is the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. Papua New Guinea is in the Pacific and unrelated to any of them.
• Mauritania and Mauritius — a Saharan country on Africa's Atlantic coast, and an Indian Ocean island nation east of Madagascar.

Capitals that are not the largest city

A smaller but persistent error. The largest city is often assumed to be the capital, and frequently is not: Washington rather than New York, Canberra rather than Sydney, Ottawa rather than Toronto, Brasília rather than São Paulo, Abuja rather than Lagos, Ankara rather than Istanbul, Wellington rather than Auckland, Bern rather than Zurich.

The pattern is not coincidental. Many of these were chosen precisely because they were not the dominant city — a compromise between rival centres, or a deliberate attempt to shift power away from an overgrown commercial capital.

Two countries entirely inside another

Three countries in the world are completely surrounded by a single other country. Vatican City and San Marino are both enclosed by Italy, and Lesotho is entirely surrounded by South Africa.

Lesotho is the outlier of the three by size and is the only country in the world with all of its territory above 1,000 metres.

Why these persist

What the errors have in common is that none of them is corrected by ordinary life. Nothing in a normal week tells you that Rome is level with Chicago. The Mercator distortion is invisible unless you go looking for it, because the map does not announce that it is trading area for angle.

They are corrected by being tested and getting them wrong — which is the entire argument for quizzing yourself rather than reading. The map quiz and the continent quiz between them surface most of the errors on this page within a few rounds.