North America Capitals Quiz

About this quiz

A capital is the city where a country’s government sits, and it is not always the biggest or the best known. Canberra, Ottawa and Brasília were chosen, or even built from scratch, as compromises between rival cities, and Sydney, Toronto and Istanbul are all larger than their country’s capital. A few countries share the role between cities: South Africa has three capitals, and this quiz uses Pretoria, where the government sits.

Each question names a country and gives four cities to choose from, all from the same part of the world. Countries whose capital has the same name, such as Singapore and Monaco, are left out, and so are a few whose capital is disputed. At the end you can see every capital you missed.

North America

In North America, the United States and Canada both chose capitals that are not their largest cities: Washington, D.C. was built on land set aside for it in 1790, and Ottawa was picked by Queen Victoria in 1857, partly because it lay between English- and French-speaking Canada. Belize moved its capital inland to Belmopan after a hurricane flattened Belize City in 1961. Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is home to about a third of the island’s people.

Flag images: flag-icons by Panayiotis Lipiridis (MIT licence).